Elsinore Books

Continuing the Best of Poetry series, this anthology brings together 150 of the finest passages from Shakespeare’s plays and poetic works. We hope our selection will allow readers to rediscover the brilliance of Shakespeare’s poetic inventiveness, and the depth and subtlety of his insight as he creates and explores the minds of the most fully-realised and autonomous characters in all of fiction.

The beauty in these fragments is best unlocked by reading them aloud, savouring the rhythms, the rich ambiguity of metaphor, and vivid evocation of scene. Learn them by heart if you can, and when inspired, revisit the complete plays and admire the passages anew in their native soil.

As with other volumes in the Best of Poetry series, the works included here are organised thematically, and arranged in such a way that they may interpret and illumine one another. There are eleven themes: The Forms of Things Unknown; Reason and Rapture; The Purple Testament; Love; Immortal Time and Mortal Man; Ambition and Jealousy; Wrath and Vengeance; Mark the Music; The Tragic Soul; Grief and Death; and Sonnets.

The passages are introduced by a small collection of quotations from some of the most perceptive interpreters of Shakespeare’s work. There then follows the main contents page, and an accompanying alphabetical index of plays to help you locate specific passages.

At Elsinore Books we pride ourselves on creating beautiful e-books, and devote great attention to formatting, and ease of navigation. This book contains a cleanly-styled contents page that permits easy movement between the poems. We regularly update the formatting of our books, to ensure they will always remain perfectly accessible on all e-reader models.

This book is part of the Best of Poetry series, which also includes:
The Best of Poetry: Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn
The Best of Poetry: A Young Person’s Book of Evergreen Verse

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