Four comedies of Shakespeare

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-02-01
Features: Easy Read Classics Series. To promote English learning among Chinese middle school students and cultivate their cultural literacy and literary appreciation, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, after extensive deliberation and market research, decided to introduce a series of abridged literary classics from Macmillan Publishing Company in the UK to Chinese middle school students. From this series of abridged literary classics by Macmillan, SFLP carefully selected 40 books, compiling them into the "Easy Read Classics Series," with difficulty levels spanning levels 3 to 8 of the "English Curriculum Standards." This series includes classic works by literary masters from the UK, the US, France, and other countries, featuring the works of renowned authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Hardy, and Alexandre Dumas. To help Chinese middle school students better grasp the essence of the original works and the creative journeys of the authors, SFLP has specially annotated the language difficulties in the reading materials and included background introductions about the authors and their works. We sincerely hope that the "Easy Read Classics Series" will help improve the literary appreciation level of Chinese middle school students, cultivate their moral character, enhance their English reading skills, and become the key to opening the door to English literary classics for middle school students. This book includes four of Shakespeare's comedies. The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona are Shakespeare's early comedies, first performed on stage around 1594. At this stage, Shakespeare made his debut in comedy and gradually established himself as a playwright. The plots in these plays were still quite rough and mostly adapted from existing stories. The characters often appeared in disguise, making them easily recognizable to the audience, but strangely, the other characters were completely fooled. The characters would suddenly change their minds—for instance, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus falls in love with Julia one day and with Silvia the next; Valentine loves Silvia but impulsively gives her to Proteus. The entire plot of The Comedy of Errors is built on bizarre coincidences: two pairs of identical twins, one pair called Antipholus and the other called Dolphindor. No one could distinguish between these two pairs of twins, not even the masters, servants, or wives.