Revenge plays are works typically written during the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods wherein a protagonist seeks vengeance, pursuing a path that often leads to madness and/or ruin. The Spanish Tragedy features the character Hieronimo’s attempts to avenge his son Horatio, who was killed by Lorenzo, the scheming nephew of the king of Portugal.

Passage adapted from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587)

This is “The Tyger,” one of the best known poems by the English poet William Blake (1757-1827).

William Cowper wrote John Gilpin (1782), John Keats wrote Poems (1816), Christina Rossetti wrote Goblin Market (1862), and Matthew Arnold wrote Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852).

Passage adapted from William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794).

Revenge plays are works typically written during the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods wherein a protagonist seeks vengeance, pursuing a path that often leads to madness and/or ruin. The Spanish Tragedy features the character Hieronimo’s attempts to avenge his son Horatio, who was killed by Lorenzo, the scheming nephew of the king of Portugal.

Passage adapted from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587)

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

Revenge plays are works typically written during the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods wherein a protagonist seeks vengeance, pursuing a path that often leads to madness and/or ruin. The Spanish Tragedy features the character Hieronimo’s attempts to avenge his son Horatio, who was killed by Lorenzo, the scheming nephew of the king of Portugal.

Passage adapted from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587)

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

The Remains of the Day (1989)is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It concerns Lord Darlington’s butler Stevens and his relationship with a housekeeper in the days leading up to World War II.

Arundhati Roy won the 1999 Man Booker for The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Salman Rushdie won the Booker in 1981 for Midnight's Children (1981), and Yann Martel is Canadian.

These are the opening lines of John Dryden’s political allegory Absalom and Achitophel, a book-length poem concerning the rebellion of Absalom against the Biblical King David.

Passage adapted from John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681)