Shakespeare and the Afterlife
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Shakespeare and the Afterlife
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Narrated by:
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Steven Crossley
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By:
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John S. Garrison
About this listen
The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising.
Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living.
Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
In this new edition Musa views Dante's intention as one of cruel and comic commentary on the shallowness and self-pity of his protagonist, who only occasionally glimpses the true nature of love. "...the explication de texte which accompanies [Musa's] translation is instructively novel, always admirable..." his present work offers English listeners a lengthy appraisal which should figure in future scholarly discussions." (Choice)
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good classic; totally misleading description
- By Mr. Bojangles on 12-18-14
By: Dante Alighieri
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Wagnerism
- Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Alex Ross
- Length: 28 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 122
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 119
Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics - an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Not Just for Wagner Experts!
- By Rupert Pupkin on 09-26-20
By: Alex Ross
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Hamlet
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser, full cast
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 201
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 87
Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies. In writing this extraordinary play, Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly 2,000 years - you would have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity. This production features the voice of Anton Lesser as Hamlet along with a full cast.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Copy
- By Kirby on 11-27-03
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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
- By: Stephen Greenblatt
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 157
Bolder even than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity's first parents. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness.
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4 out of 5 stars
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For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
- By Darwin8u on 02-11-18
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Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
- Why the Greeks Matter
- By: Thomas Cahill
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 338
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 155
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Story4 out of 5 stars 155
Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Super super
- By Richard on 12-28-03
By: Thomas Cahill
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Asian Journals
- India and Japan (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)
- By: Joseph Campbell
- Narrated by: Fred Stella
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
At the beginning of his career, Joseph Campbell developed a lasting fascination with the cultures of the Far East, and explorations of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy later became recurring motifs in his vast body of work. However, Campbell had to wait until middle age to visit the lands that inspired him so deeply. In 1954, he took a sabbatical from his teaching position and embarked on a year-long voyage through India, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally Japan.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What a journey!
- By Anonymous User on 08-11-18
By: Joseph Campbell
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story5 out of 5 stars 42
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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All Things Shining
- Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular World
- By: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 176
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 145
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 145
The religious turn to their faith to find meaning. But what about the many people who lead secular lives and are also hungry for meaning? What guides, what approaches are available to them? Distinguished philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is indeed within reach.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Book that refreshes the classics
- By Tod on 06-14-11
By: Hubert Dreyfus, and others
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Silence and Beauty
- Hidden Faith Born of Suffering
- By: Makoto Fujimura, Philip Yancey - foreword
- Narrated by: Ova Saopeng
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 49
Shusaku Endo's novel Silence took visual artist Makoto Fujimura on a pilgrimage of grappling with the nature of art, the significance of pain, and his own cultural heritage. His artistic faith journey overlaps with Endo's as he uncovers deep layers of meaning in Japanese history and literature, expressed in art both past and present. He finds connections to how faith is lived amid trauma and glimpses of how the Gospel is conveyed in Christ-hidden cultures.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A unique book of history and reflections
- By M. Burlingame on 02-26-18
By: Makoto Fujimura, and others
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The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 501
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 454
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 451
C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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4 out of 5 stars
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis
- How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind
- By: Jason M Baxter
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 115
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 100
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Story5 out of 5 stars 100
C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent
- By andrew wilson smith on 03-08-22
By: Jason M Baxter
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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God
- A Biography
- By: Jack Miles
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
What sort of "person" is God? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book--as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and abiguities of a Hamlet? In this "brilliant, audacious book" ( Chicago Tribune), a former Jesuit marshalls a vast array of learning and knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate God--and man--with a sense of discovery and wonder.
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4 out of 5 stars
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God of flaws - Less human due to his humanity
- By Jacobus on 01-27-15
By: Jack Miles