There is so much to love here. Epic tragedies - Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear - joined by their lesser, but poetically affecting counterparts like Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare plays with and shuffles around comic tropes in his wide variety of comedies: peaks include The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. There was the beautiful Maria (who, strangely enough, didn’t look Puerto Rican). There was a gorgeous man named Bernardo. My tomboy days were over. On the Hyphasis he erected 12 altars to the 12 Olympian gods, and on the Hydaspes he built a fleet of 800 to 1,000 ships. Leaving Porus, he then proceeded down the river and into the Indus, with half his forces on shipboard and half marching in three columns down the two banks. The fleet was commanded by Nearchus, and Alexander’s own captain was Onesicritus; both later wrote accounts of the campaign. The march was attended with much fighting and heavy, pitiless slaughter; at the storming of one town of the Malli near the Hydraotes ( Ravi) River, Alexander received a severe wound which left him weakened.

I would also like to list the reasons here that Shakespeare's works are classics instead of going into the same points repeatedly as I review each work. They are classics, I can't dispute it, whether or not I enjoy each individual play or not. And I do believe this is the first time that an author has gotten 8 out of 10 of my Definitions for a Classic. Kim Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream or the Prophecy of Petesis,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, eds. A. Blasius and B. Schipper (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002), 230.

Key principles

Footnotes at the bottom of the columns. This makes them both handy and unobtrusive. Liked by this reader. Sonnets and more sonnets, more dramas, more histories and more comedies. With a multitude of clever quotations, I am definitely still in Shakespeare heaven.

If you're thinking about trying the Alexander technique, it's important to choose a teacher who's experienced and qualified.

Availability and regulation

I decided to start with “Hamlet” because I just read a biography of John Quincy Adams and it was his favorite work. At 4000 lines, it is Shaekespeare’s longest play. Harold Bloom considers “Hamlet” to be “the most extraordinary single work of Western literature that I have ever read” (2003 PBS interview). a b c Donzel, Emeri J. van; Schmidt, Andrea Barbara (2010). Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam's Quest for Alexander's Wall. Brill. p.17. ISBN 978-90-04-17416-0. The episode of Alexander's building a wall against Gog and Magog, however, is not found in the oldest Greek, Latin, Armenian and Syriac versions of the Romance. Though the Alexander Romance was decisive for the spreading of the new and supernatural image of Alexander the king in East and West, the barrier episode has not its origin in this text. The fusion of the motif of Alexander's barrier with the Biblical tradition of the apocalyptic peoples Gog and Magog appears in fact for the first time in the so called Syriac Alexander Legend. This text is a short appendix attached to the Syriac manuscripts of the Alexander Romance.