Audio book in mp3

 

Hamlet

Author : William Shakespeare

Performed By : Full Cast Performance

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 3 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations
Classic Literature
Audio Theater
Shakespeare
Drama

Our Price : $22.25

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Michael Sheen, Kenneth Cranham and Juliet Stevenson star in the best-known and most powerful tragedy of modern times.



BBC radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since I 923, when the newly formed company broadcast its first full-length play, generations of actors and producers have honed and perfected the craft of making Shakespeare to be heard.



Those decades of experience come to fruition in this production.The intimacy of radio gives full rein to the power of Shakespeare's language, taking the listener into the very centre of Hamlet's emotional and moral turmoil.



The play is introduced by Richard Eyre, former Director of the Royal National Theatre, and the accompanying booklet includes a scene-by-scene synopsis, full character analysis, brief biographies of the leading actors and of Shakespeare himself, as well as an essay from the producer on their interpretation of the play.



Revitalised, original and comprehensive - this is Shakespeare for the new millennium.

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Canterbury Tales - Volume I, The

Author : Geoffrey Chaucer

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : Select Music & Distribution

Runtime : 3 hours 20 minutes

Categories : Poetry
Classic Literature
Dramatizations
Classics
Short Stories

Our Price : $15.49

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The Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Tale
The Pardoner's Tale
The Merchant's Tale
The Franklin's Tale

Chaucer's greatest work, written towards the end of the fourteenth century, paints a brilliant picture of medieval life, society and values. The stories range from the romantic, courtly idealism of The Knight's Tale to the joyous bawdy of The Miller's; all are told with a freshness and vigour in this modern verse translation that make them a delight to hear.

The Canterbury Tales, written near the end of Chaucer's life and hence towards the close of the fourteenth century, Is perhaps the greatest English literary work of the Middle Ages: yet it speaks to us today with almost undimmed clarity and relevance.

Chaucer imagines a group of twenty-nine pilgrims who meet in the Tabard Inn in Southwark, intent on making the traditional journey to the martyr's shrine of St Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Harry Bailly landlord of the Tabard, proposes that the company should entertain themselves on the road with a storytelling competition. The teller of the best tale will be rewarded with a supper at the others' expense when the travellers return to London. Chaucer never completed this elaborate scheme - each pilgrim was supposed to tell four tales, but in fact we only have twenty-four altogether - yet, with the pieces of linking narrative and the prologues to each tale, the work as a whole constitutes a marvellously varied evocation of the medieval world which also goes beyond its period to penetrate (humorously, gravely tolerantly) human nature itself.

Chaucer, as a member of this company of pilgrims, presents himself with mock innocence as the admiring observer of his fellows, depicted in the General Prologue. Many of these are clearly rogues - the coarse, cheating Miller, the repulsive yet compelling Pardoner - yet in each of them Chaucer finds something human, often a sheer vitality or love of life which is irresistible: the Monk may prefer hunting to prayer, but he is after all a manly man, to be an abbot able. Perhaps only the unassuming, devoted Parson and his humbly labouring brother the Ploughman rise entirely above Chaucer's teasing irony; certainly the Parson's fellow clergy and religious officers belong to a Church riddled with gross corruption. Everyone, it seems, is on the make, in a world still recovering from the ravages of the Black Death.