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King Lear

Author : William Shakespeare

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : Select Music & Distribution

Runtime : 3 hours 55 minutes

Categories : Shakespeare

Our Price : $15.49

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King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's most profoundly searching and disturbing tragedy, is the story of a foolish and self-indulgent king who learns, late in life and after terrible suffering, the value of self-knowledge. The play asks the ancient questions about God and the meaning of pain with uncompromising directness, but provides no reassuring answers...

King Lear, probably dating from 1605, was first printed in a quarto version in 1608 and in a different form in the First Folio of 1623. It is the third In Shakespeare's great sequence of four tragedies: Hamlet (1600-01) and Othello (1602-1604) precede it, and Macbeth (1606) follows. It possesses the widest emotional and thematic reach of them all, occupying a space which achieves an almost abstract, symbolic quality while at the same time offering a painful concreteness of experience: it is both intensely personal and impressively universal, tackling the great questions of suffering and morality ('is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?') within the context of a social conscience CO! I have ta'en too little care of this') and an anguished questioning of God (or the gods, who, it seems, 'kill us for their sport').

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Alexander's Bridge

Author : Willa Cather

Performed By : Marguerite Gavin

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 2 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Classic Literature

Our Price : $25.95 $9.95

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There is a pleasure in listening to the imagery of Alexander's Bridge that is similar to
viewing a beautiful watercolor, as in the following description of a Boston street in late afternoon: "The sun
sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery twilight was setting in when
Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow."

Against this delicate imagery, Willa Cather renders the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley
Alexander is a master bridge engineer. At forty-three he is at the height of his power, comfortable with success
and all it brings. Yet he yearns for the lost vibrancy of his youth. He leads a double life, veering between his
beautiful, accomplished wife and his mistress, an actress he knew as a student in Paris. This conflict creates
a crack in the structure of his life which ultimately undermines him.