Rene Weis

This reissed edition of Longman Annotated Texts King Lear includes comprehensive notes, annotations and an introduction, all designed to be of use to undergraduates and interested readers.King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied tragedies. However, since the late 1970s textual scholars, critics and editors have argued that there is no single 'King Lear' text. Anyone studying the play needs to be aware of two different texts, one based on the quarto of 1608, The History of King Lear, and a revised version published in the first folio of 1623, The Tragedy of King Lear. This edition offers a fully annotated, modern spelling version of the texts set side by side, identifying and elucidating the major discrepancies between the two. It presents some possible reasons for the differences between the two texts, which themselves shed light on a number of issues relating to literary transmission in the Renaissance and give an insight into the nature of performance and censorship.

The Real Traviata is the rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La Dame aux Camelias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans. Her life was painfully short, but by sheer willpower, intelligence, talent, and stunning looks she attained such prominence in the French capital that ministers of the government and even members of theFrench royal family fell under her spell. In the 1840s she commanded the kind of 'paparazzi' attention that today we associate only with major royalty or the biggest Hollywood stars. Aside from the younger Dumas, her conquests included a host of writers and artists, including the greatest pianist of the century, Franz Liszt, with whom she once hoped to elope. When she died Theophile Gautier, one of the most important Parisian writers of the day, penned an obituary fit for a princess. Indeed, he boldly claimed that she hadbeen a princess, notwithstanding her peasant origin and her distinctly demi-monde existence. And although now largely forgotten, in the years immediately after her death, Marie's legend if anything grew in stature, with her immortalization in Verdi's La traviata, an opera in which the great Romantic composer tried to capture her essence in some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.

On a steamy August night in 1952, a British family settles down to sleep beside their car in a lay-by. Before daybreak all three of them, a father, a mother, and their ten-year-old daughter, have been brutally murdered. In a remote corner of Provence two worlds collide under a full moon. The British family are pioneering scientists and cosmopolitan; the French family accused of the crime are farmers defined by their land and codes of conduct which struck outsiders as feral. The accused farmers closed ranks and lied repeatedly in the shadow of the guillotine and to save the family’s honour. An inspector calls. With extraordinary tenacity he tracks down the man dubbed ‘the monster of the farm of the damned’. This is the true story of the most contested murder in France since the Second World War, the inspiration for films and tales of espionage, hit squads, wartime bullion treasure, and chemical weapons research. Doubts still linger locally in this part of France as to the final judicial outcome. Conspiracy theories about the reason for the murders are routinely aired, and some family members of the man finally convicted of the crime still claim his innocence.

The Real Traviata is the rags-to-riches story of a tragic young woman whose life inspired one of the most famous operas of all time, Verdi's masterpiece La traviata, as well as one of the most scandalous and successful French novels of the nineteenth century, La Dame aux Camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. The woman at the centre of the story, Marie Duplessis, escaped from her life as an abused teenage girl in provincial Normandy, rising in an amazingly short space of time to the apex of fashionable life in nineteenth century Paris, where she was considered the queen of the Parisian courtesans. Her life was painfully short, but by sheer willpower, intelligence, talent, and stunning looks she attained such prominence in the French capital that ministers of the government and even members of the French royal family fell under her spell. In the 1840s, she commanded the kind of 'paparazzi' attention that today we associate only with major royalty or the biggest Hollywood stars. Aside from the younger Dumas, her conquests included a host of writers and artists, including the greatest pianist of the century, Franz Liszt, with whom she once hoped to elope. When she died Théophile Gautier, one of the most important Parisian writers of the day, penned an obituary fit for a princess. Indeed, he boldly claimed that she had been a princess, notwithstanding her peasant origin and her distinctly demi-monde existence. And although now largely forgotten, in the years immediately after her death, Marie's legend if anything grew in stature, with her immortalization in Verdi's La traviata, an opera in which the great Romantic composer tried to capture her essence in some of the most heart-wrenching and lyrical music ever composed.

This reissed edition of Longman Annotated Texts King Lear includes comprehensive notes, annotations and an introduction, all designed to be of use to undergraduates and interested readers.King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied tragedies. However, since the late 1970s textual scholars, critics and editors have argued that there is no single 'King Lear' text. Anyone studying the play needs to be aware of two different texts, one based on the quarto of 1608, The History of King Lear, and a revised version published in the first folio of 1623, The Tragedy of King Lear. This edition offers a fully annotated, modern spelling version of the texts set side by side, identifying and elucidating the major discrepancies between the two. It presents some possible reasons for the differences between the two texts, which themselves shed light on a number of issues relating to literary transmission in the Renaissance and give an insight into the nature of performance and censorship.

At last--a key that unlocks the secrets of Shakespeare's life Intimacies with Southampton and Marlowe, entanglements in London with the elusive dark lady, the probable fathering of an illegitimate son--these are among the mysteries of Shakespeare's rich and turbulent life that have proven tantalizingly obscure. Despite an avalanche of recent scholarship, Ren Weis, an acknowledged authority on the Elizabethan period, believes the links between the bard's life and the poems and plays have been largely ignored. Armed with a wealth of new archival research and his own highly regarded interpretations of the literature, the author finds provocative parallels between Shakespeare's early experiences in the bustling market town of Stratford--including a dangerous poaching incident and contacts with underground Catholics--and the plays. Breaking with tradition, Weis reveals that it is the plays and poems themselves that contain the richest seam of clues about the details of Shakespeare's personal life, at home in Stratford and in the shadowy precincts of theatrical London--details of a code unbroken for four hundred years.

Provides an in-depth study of the medieval Cathar community, which, during the thirteenth century, became the focus of systematic repression by the Catholic Church, were branded as heretics, and suffered successive waves of persecution and execution, but whose faith led them to defy the Catholic Church and the Inquisition for more than thirty years. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

In the 13th century, a group of heretics in southwest France, the Cathars, became a serious threat to the Catholic church. In several waves of repression, thousands of Cathars were killed. Yet so ardent was their faith that, early in the next century, the Cathars rose one last time. Using the breathtakingly detailed and uniquely extant documentation from this period, and drawing on his intimate knowledge of the last Cathars' tracks and hiding places, many of which survive to this day, René Weis tells the full story of this gripping historical episode.