Molecular biology has revolutionized our understanding of animals and their evolution. In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Holland provides an authoritative summary of the modern view of animal life, its origins, and the new classification resulting from DNA studies.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of Shakespeare's most renowned plays, celebrated for its diverse staging possibilities. The work explores the relationships between genders in various societal contexts and a magical fairy realm. These relationships range from passionate love to strictly arranged marriages. The multitude of characters and layers of action creates a vibrant cosmos that culminates in comedic and fantastical harmony. The story follows Theseus, the ruler of Athens, who intends to force Egeus' daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, but she loves Lysander and flees with him. Hermia's friend Helena, who is in love with Demetrius, betrays their escape. In the forest, a group of craftsmen rehearses a play to honor Theseus' wedding to Hippolyta. There, the fairy king Oberon and his sprite Puck create confusion with the juice of a magical flower: Titania falls in love with a transformed donkey, and both Lysander and Demetrius become infatuated with Helena, leading to a series of humorous entanglements.
In Rome, tensions rise as the upper class indulges in luxury while the common people suffer from hunger. General Caius Martius, a staunch opponent of the plebeians' demands, leads his army against the invading Volscians and achieves a remarkable victory at Corioles, earning him the title of Coriolanus. However, upon returning to Rome and seeking a political career, his arrogance becomes his downfall. Coriolanus harshly insults the populace and their representatives, ultimately facing the threat of exile. The once-heroic figure finds himself fallen from grace, but the tragedy is only beginning...
What does it signify when a Shakespearean character forgets something or when Hamlet determines to 'wipe away all trivial fond records'? How might forgetting be an act to be performed, or be linked to forgiveness, such as when in The Winter's Tale Cleomenes encourages Leontes to 'forget your evil. / With them, forgive yourself'? And what do we as readers and audiences forget of Shakespeare's works and of the performances we watch? This is the first book devoted to a broad consideration of how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. A wide-ranging study of how Shakespeare dramatizes forgetting, it offers close readings of Shakespeare's plays, considering what Shakespeare forgot and what we forget about Shakespeare. The book touches on an equally broad range of forgetting theory from antiquity through to the present day, of forgetting in recent novels and films, and of creative ways of making sense of how our world constructs the cultural meaning of and anxiety about forgetting. Drawing on dozens of productions across the history of Shakespeare on stage and film, the book explores Shakespeare's dramaturgy, from characters who forget what they were about to say, to characters who leave the stage never to return, from real forgetting to performed forgetting, from the mad to the powerful, from playgoers to Shakespeare himself.