18 books like What every woman knows
Candida
The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a respectable socialist clergyman, spends his days giving lectures and sermons while his wife, Candida, sees to his comfortable London home. That home is disrupted by the arrival of the poet Eugene Marchbanks, who is in love with Candida and determined to rescue her from what he sees as an unromantic life. Shaw wrote Candida as a reaction to Henrik Ibsen’s social…
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The Way of the World
The Way of the World is a comedy play written by the English playwright William Congreve, first performed in 1700. It premiered in the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. It is widely regarded by critics as one of the finest works of Restoration comedy ever written, and has often been called a centrepiece of the genre. Initially, however, the play struck many audience members as continuing…
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An Ideal Husband
An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. The action is set in London, in "the present", and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. "Sooner or later," Wilde notes, "we shall all have to pay for what we do." But he adds that, "No one should be entirely…
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Love for Love
Valentine, Sir Sampson's dissolute eldest son, finds himself at a standstill; the only way out of his financial difficulties is to give in to his father's pressure to renounce his right of inheritance. While this suggestion immediately increases the chances of his bluff younger brother Ben on the marriage mart, Valentine's own chances with his beloved Angelica would proportionally decrease. To…
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The school for scandal, 1780
The School for Scandal debuted at Drury Lane Theater in London in 1777. The play is still popular and regularly performed today. It is a comedy of manners about "the deceptive nature of appearances, the fickleness of reputation, [and] the often disreputable guises behind which goodness and honesty can conceal itself."
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The Tragedy of Jane Shore
This tragedy in five acts was originally performed in the early eighteenth century. The play focuses on one of King Henry IV’s most notorious mistresses, Jane Shore.
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Back to Methuselah
Five linked plays that expound Shaw's philosophy of creative evolution in an extended dramatic parable that progresses through time from the Garden of Edesn to AD 31,920. Cf Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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The Alchemist, 1612
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of Ben Jonson's _The Alchemist_ that it had one out of the three most perfect plots in literature. This play, with its sharp portrayal of human folly, is considered by many to be Jonson's best comedy. First performed 1610, its popularity has endured to this day.
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She Stoops To Conquer
She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy by the Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith, first performed in London in 1773.
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Henry IV, Part 1
Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.
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Major Barbara
This is a play with the theme of societal salvation and salvation of the human soul brought out in characters representing the rich versus the poor.
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King Lear
Lear decides to abdicate and split his kingdom between his three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Cordelia refuses to flatter her father like her sisters and is banished. Goneril and Regan betray Lear who goes mad.
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All for Love; or, The World Well Lost
Written in 1677, Dryden's heroic drama 'All For Love, or, The World Well Lost' is his best-known and most performed play. It is a tragedy written in blank verse and is an attempt on Dryden's part to reinvigorate serious drama. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra', and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine.
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Androcles and the lion
Based on the fable about a Greek tailor's conversion to Christianity, his befriending of a lion, and gladiatorial experience in Nero's Coliseum.
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The misfortunes of Arthur
This book contains images of pages from the 16th-century play titled "The Misfortunes of Arthur" by Thomas Hughes and fellow members of Grays Inn.
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The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
Marlowe's play has two different recognized texts, with most editions based on the B text. Due to recent arguments for the authenticity of A, this edition is based on the A text. It includes a discussion of biographical, dramatic and theatrical aspects of the play.
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The Admirable Crichton
The story of the play concerns an aristocratic English family who revert to the state of Nature when shipwrecked on a desert island. While there, they are willing slaves to their former butler, but on return to civilization, the positions are shifted.
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Paris
Presents a multigenerational saga detailing the history of Paris, from its founding under the Romans to the hotbed of cultural activity during the 1920s and 1930s. It is an epic portrait of Paris that leaps through centuries as it weaves the tales of families whose fates are forever entwined with the City of Lights. The multigenerational saga takes listeners on a journey through thousands of…
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