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William Yeats

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

The 18 plays are: The Shadowy Waters; Cathleen in Houlihan; The Hour Glass; On Baile's Strabd; The Green Helmet; Deirdre; At the Hawk's Well; The Dreaming of the Bones; The Cat and the Moon; The Only Jealousy of Emer; Calvary; Sophocles' King Oedipus; The Resurrection; The Words Upon the Windwo-FPane; The King of the Great Clock Tower; The herne's Egg; Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain.

Selected Plays

Tennessee Williams

Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arrive, Laura's romantic illusions are crushed.

The Glass Menagerie

William Shakespeare

'All the world's a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players'­ 
 
Rosalind, banished by her cruel uncle, travels secretly to the Forest of Arden, where her exiled father holds court. There, dressed as a boy to avoid discovery, she encounters the man she loves - now a fellow exile - and resolves to remain in disguise to test his feelings for her. One of Shakespeare's most sunny, fast-paced and accessible comedies, As You Like It is an exuberant combination of 
 concealed identities and verbal jousting, burlesque and pastoral dream, reconciliations and multiple weddings. 
 
Used and Recommended by the National Theatre 
 
General Editor Stanley Wells 
Edited by H. J. Oliver 
Introduction by Katherine Duncan-Jones

As You Like It

'He could mingle sublimity with pathos, bitterness with joy and peace and love' Aldous Huxley 
 
In one of Shakespeare's most perennially popular comedies a young woman, Hermia, flees ancient Athens with her lover, only to be pursued by her would-be husband and her best friend. Unwittingly, all four find themselves in an enchanted forest where fairies and sprites take an interest in human affairs, dispensing magical love potions and casting mischievous spells. Slapstick collides with courtly romance and confusion ends in harmony, as love is transformed, misplaced and ultimately restored. 
 
Used and Recommended by the National Theatre 
 
General Editor Stanley Wells 
Edited by Stanley Wells 
Introduction by Helen Hackett

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens describes in Night Walks his time as an insomniac, when he decided to cure himself by walking through London in the small hours, and discovered homelessness, drunkenness and vice on the streets. This collection of essays shows Dickens as one of the greatest visionaries of the city in all its variety and cruelty. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Night Walks

George Bernard Shaw

Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments manufacturer, loves money and despises poverty. His estranged daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by throwing her energies into her work as a Major in the Salvation Army, and sees her father as another soul to be saved. But when the Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day with a large cheque - forcing Barbara to examine her moral assumptions. Are they right to accept money that has been obtained by 'Death and Destruction'? Full of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara is one of Shaw's most forward-looking plays, brilliantly testing the tensions between religion, wealth and power, benevolence and equality, and metaphors and realities of war.

Major Barbara

Elizabeth Browning

Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic novel in blank verse, tells the story of the making of a woman poet, exploring 'the woman question', art and its relation to politics and social oppression. The texts in this selection are based in the main on the earliest printed versions of the poems. What Edgar Allan Poe called 'her wild and magnificent genius' is abundantly in evidence. In addition to Aurora Leigh, this volume contains poetry from the several volumes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's published poetry from 1826 to 1862, including Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Songs for the Ragged Schools of London (1854) and the British Library manuscript text of the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' (1846) which records her courtship with Robert Browning.

Aurora Leigh and Other Poems

Arthur Miller

A car wreck on the slopes of Mount Morgan puts insurance tycoon Lyman Felt in the hospital. While Lyman recovers, two women meet in the hospital waiting room only to discover that they are both married to him. With his secrets exposed, Lyman tries to justify himself to the two women - the prim, cultured Theo and the restless, ambitious Leah - at the same time hoping to convince himself that he is blameless. 
 
Moving between broad farce and delicate tragedy, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan explores the struggle between honesty with others and honesty with oneself.

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

Georges Bataille

'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and powerful argument.

Literature and Evil

'The magic in The Tempest is real ... It contains a great many unanswered questions' Margaret Atwood 
 
A storm rages. Prospero and his daughter watch from their desert island as a ship carrying the royal family is wrecked. Miraculously, all on board survive. Plotting, mistaken identities, bewitching love and enchantment follow as the travellers explore this mysterious place of spirits and monsters, and discover that all is not as it seems. Shakespeare's late, great play is a work filled with marvels, music and strangeness, fully exploiting the power of language and the magic of theatre. 
 
Used and Recommended by the National Theatre 
 
General Editor Stanley Wells 
Edited with an Introduction by Martin Butler

The Tempest

Emily Brontë

'... ever-present, phantom thing; 
My slave, my comrade, and my king' 
 
Some of Emily Brontë's most extraordinary poems 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Emily Brontë (1818-1848). Brontë's Wuthering Heights and The Complete Poems are available in Penguin Classics

The Night is Darkening Round Me

Seneca

Based on the legends used in Greek drama, Seneca's plays are notable for the exuberant ruthlessness with which disastrous events are foretold and then pursued to their tragic and often bloodthirsty ends. Thyestes depicts the menace of an ancestral curse hanging over two feuding brothers, while Phaedra portrays a woman tormented by fatal passion for her stepson. In The Trojan Women, the widowed Hecuba and Andromache await their fates at the hands of the conquering Greeks, and Oedipus follows the downfall of the royal House of Thebes. Octavia is a grim commentary on Nero's tyrannical rule and the execution of his wife, with Seneca himself appearing as an ineffective counsellor attempting to curb the atrocities of the emperor.

Four Tragedies and Octavia

Dan Laurence

Androcles and the Lion is a 1912 play written by George Bernard Shaw. 
 
Androcles and the Lion is Shaw's retelling of the tale of Androcles, a slave who is saved by the requited mercy of a lion. In the play, Shaw makes Androcles out to be one of many Christians being led to the Colosseum for torture. Characters in the play exemplify several themes and takes on both modern and supposed early Christianity, including cultural clash between Jesus' teachings and traditional Roman values.

Androcles and the Lion

'This, of the history plays, is The Tragedy ... the most lyrical Shakespeare ever wrote' Simon Schama 
 
The old king Henry IV, sick and weary, must send out his forces - including the unruly Falstaff - to meet another rebellion that threatens to bring the country to the brink of civil war. But as the conflict grows, he must also confront a more personal problem - how to make his troublesome son Prince Hal accept his duty as heir and leave his carousing companions behind. Pitting youth against old age, son against father, carefree hope against the realities of ruling, this is an elegiac drama of pathos and regret. 
 
Used and Recommended by the National Theatre 
 
General Editor Stanley Wells 
Edited by Peter Davison 
Introduction by Adrian Poole

Henry IV Part Two

Richard Sheridan

The three plays collected in this volume demonstrate Sheridan's unerring ability to create unrivalled comedy out of ingenious plots, witty repartee, farcical situations and flamboyant characters. And while he never overtly moralizes, Sheridan uses brilliant comedy to deflate hypocrisy and satirize the manners of his age. In The Rivals, Captain Absolute becomes his own rival for the hand of Lydia Languish - wooing her under another name, while her aunt, the verbally inept Mrs Malaprop, wishes her to marry the real Captain. School for Scandal continues the theme of imposture when Sir Oliver tests his nephews by appearing to them in disguise, and learns that reputation and the approval of society are of little value. And The Critic, featuring the pompous Puff and the arrogant Sneer, is a mocking depiction of the theatre, playwrights and, of course, critics.

The School for Scandal and Other Plays

A.E. Housman

A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at A. E. Housman's own expense. The collection of lyrical poems became hugely successful following the Second Boer War and World War I, with themes such as nostalgia for one's home and the patriotic celebration of the life of the solider striking a chord with English readers. This collection contains Housman's greatest works, demonstrating the lyrical precision and emotional depth of his writing. It includes 'To an Athlete Dying Young', a lyrical elegy to a life lost at its prime and 'When I was One-and-Twenty', a love poem on the ignorance of youth.

A Shropshire Lad

George Orwell

In this collection of eight witty and sharply written essays, Orwell looks at, among others, the joys of spring (even in London), the picture of humanity painted by Gulliver and his travels, and the strange benefit of the doubt that the public permit Salvador Dali. Also included here are a mouth-watering essay on the delights of English Cooking and a shocking account of killing an elephant in Burma. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Evelyn Waugh

Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or defending traditional English architecture, inviting readers to 'come inside' the Catholic Church or expressing his contempt for modish Marxism and American-style religion, Evelyn Waugh's journalism is sparkling, sometimes vitriolic and always full of good sense. In this wonderful selection he explores his Oxford youth, his unexpected conversion, his literary enthusiasms (from P. G. Wodehouse to Graham Greene) and the perils of basing fictional characters on real people. Decades after their publication, these pieces still retain their capacity to delight, to surprise and to shock.

A Little Order

Selected Journalism

Geoffrey Chaucer

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a jovial group of pilgrims assembles, including an unscrupulous Pardoner, a noble-minded Knight, a ribald Miller, the lusty Wife of Bath, and Chaucer himself. As they set out on their journey towards the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury, each character agrees to tell a tale. The twenty-four tales that follow are by turns learned, fantastic, pious, melancholy and lewd, and together offer an unrivalled glimpse into the mind and spirit of medieval England.

The Canterbury Tales

Kathy Acker

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 
 
'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer' Jeanette Winterson 
 
This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon. 
 
Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

Blood and Guts in High School

Merle Miller

Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller's On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What It Means To Be a Homosexual" in response to a homophobic article published in Harper's Magazine. Described as "the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade," the article was developed into the remarkable short book On Being Different - one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.

On Being Different

What It Means to Be a Homosexual

Owen Sheers

Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology in its own right. 
 
Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, and our land. Under the headings of six varieties of British landscape - London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forest, and Coast and Sea - he has collected poems that evoke qualities of the land, city and sea and have become part of the way we see these landscapes. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series, while also supplementing the poems included in the programme with his own personal favourites.

A Poet's Guide to Britain

Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. 
As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

Man and Superman

Loneliness, sexual tension and the need for human kindness pervade these three plays by Tennessee Williams, as their characters rage against personal demons and the modern world. In 'Sweet Bird of Youth', a drifter, Chance Wayne, returns to his home town with an ageing movie actress in search of the girl he loved in his youth, but with terrible, violent results. 'Period of Adjustment' tells the story of two young newlyweds who visit the husband's old army friend on Christmas Eve after unsuccessfully consummating their marriage, and unleash forbidden passion, while in 'The Night of the Iguana' a diverse group of people, including a disturbed ex-minister and a troubled spinster, are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel for one eventful night.

Sweet Bird of Youth and Other Plays

The culminating drama of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VI Part Three plays out the final breakdown of political and family affiliations. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by Norman Sanders with an introduction by Gillian Day. 
 
'There, take the crown, and with the crown my curse' 
 
Threatened by the Duke of York, King Henry makes a deal to disinherit his own son and make the Duke his heir. Queen Margaret is so angered by her husband's weakness that she declares war on the House of York. As conflict rages throughout England, political and family ties break down with tragic consequences. Can the vulnerable King hold out against the growing menace of the Duke's son, the future Richard III, to keep his throne - and his life? 
 
This book includes a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and the Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to Henry VI, Part III, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay by Rebecca Brown discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary. 
 
 William Shakespeare was born some time in late April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and died in 1616. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. 
 
 Stanley Wells is Emeritus Professor of the University of Birmingham and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Henry VI Part Three

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.

Eroticism

Tennessee Williams's controversial Hollywood screenplay Baby Doll opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the affections of the flirtatious Baby Doll, and things reach breaking-point. This volume also contains Something Unspoken, a brilliantly comic study of a wealthy, manipulative Southern spinster, and Summer and Smoke, a sexually charged portrayal of Alma, a sensitive, unmarried minister's daughter, and her childhood love, the wild, sensual doctor's son John.

Baby Doll and Other Plays

Thomas Wyatt

As a diplomat in Renaissance Europe, and a luminary at the court of Henry VII, Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in an incestuous world where everyone was uneasily subject to the royal whims and rages. Wyatt had himself survived two imprisonments in the Tower as well as a love affair with Anne Boleyn, and his poetry - that of an extraordinarily sophisticated, passionate and vulnerable man - reflects these experiences, making disguised reference to current political events. Above all, though, Wyatt is known for his love poetry, which often dramatizes incidents and remembered conversations with his beloved, with an ear acutely sensitive to patterns of rhythm and colloquial speech. Conveying the actuality of betrayal or absence, and the intense pressure of his longing for a love that could be trusted, these are some of the most haunting poems in the English language.

The Complete Poems

William Shakespeare's comic encore for one of his best-loved characters - the rascally Falstaff from Henry IV and Henry V - The Merry Wives of Windsor is edited by G.R. Hibbard with an introduction by Catherine Richardson in Penguin Shakespeare. 
 
'We'll leave a proof, by that which we will do, 
Wives may be merry, and yet honest too' 
 
In need of money, the fat and foolish Falstaff devises a scheme to seduce two married women and steal their husbands' wealth. By talking to each other, however, the wives soon discover his plan and begin to plot their own revenge. Relentlessly inventive, this comic humiliation of a foolish would-be seducer is a lively, compelling and ultimately joyous celebration of the all-conquering power of laughter. 
 
This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary. 
 
'It never yet had reader or spectator, who did not think it too soon at end' 
Samuel Johnson

The Merry Wives of Windsor

William Morris

Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834-96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.

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