Designed to meet the needs of theatre professionals, as well as general readers, this edition includes an extensive performance history, a commentary illuminating the complexities of Shakespeare's language, and a setting of the song 'Who is Silvia?' prepared from an Elizabethan source.

The death of his beloved wife leaves the Duke of Omnium, former Primer Minister, struggling to impose his will on his three children: in debt, and in love with unsuitable marriage partners, they seek to go their own way, and the novel explores family conflict, principle, and the conquering power of love.

First published pseudonymously in 1764, 'The Castle of Otranto' purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. Walpole gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting contexts.

Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, & international intrigue. In this new edition, John Sutherland examines Collins's contribution to Victorian fiction, traces his practices as a creator of plot, & provides a chronology of the novel's complicated events.

Two decades have passed since the musketeers triumphed over Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Time has weakened their resolve, and dispersed their loyalties. But when civil war endangers the throne of France, the immortal quartet come out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men and the forces of history.

Chaucer's most celebrated work, The Canterbury Tales (c.1387), in which a group of pilgrims entertain each other with stories on the road to Canterbury, is a masterpiece of narration, description, and character portrayal. The tellers and their tales are as fresh and vivid today as they were six centuries ago.

Esther Waters (1894) was one of the first English novels to defeat Victorian moral censorship. George Moore's story of a mother's fight for the life of her illegitimate son won Mr Gladstone's approval and was admitted, unaltered, into those bastions of Victorian conformity, the circulating libraries.

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

This novel is part of Oxford University Press' World's Classics series whereby some of the best loved novels are reissued with special introductions by today's most distinguished writers.