THE TELL-TALE HEART AND OTHER WRITINGS

Written by Edgar Allan Poe

“TRUE!—NERVOUS—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! But why will you say that I am mad?”
—Page 3, The Tell-Tale Heart

Fun Facts

• Poe is credited with bringing Gothic literature to America. His work fused death, nightmares, and ghosts, with the haunted landscapes of his American South.
• While Poe was already a well known author, having published many short stories, it was the publication of his novel, The Raven in 1845 that made him really famous.
• In addition to Gothic horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes, as well as poems, which Poe said to be the passion of his life.

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FOUR GREAT PLAYS

Written by Henrik Ibsen

“Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile. (Getting up.) Torvald—it was then it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man, and had borne him three children—.”
—Page 80, A Doll’s House

Fun Facts

• Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was first performed at the Independent Theatre Society, a theater without censorship. Other playwrights in the society included George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.
• Ibsen’s plays of realism were controversial and often deemed to be too radical for nineteenth century playgoers.
• Ibsen believed that Emperor and Galilean (1873) was his most important work, though his other plays like A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck were far more acclaimed pieces.

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MACBETH

Written by Shakespeare
Edited by David Bevington and David Scott Kastan

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
—The Witches, page 5, Act 1, Scene 1

Fun Facts

• In the theater world, there is a myth that the play is cursed and some people will not mention its name aloud, referring to it instead as “The Scottish play”.
• Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies leading some to speculate that the modern day version was altered quite a bit from the original.
• Written in the early reign of James I, the Scottish setting is seen as Shakespeare paying homage to his patron.

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MANSFIELD PARK

Written by Jane Austen

“Depend upon it, you see but half. You see the evil, but you do not see the consolation. There will be little rubs and disappointments every where, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better; we find comfort somewhere.”
—page 46

Fun Facts

• Mansfield Park is perhaps, for Jane Austen fans, the most controversial and yet the least popular of her major novels.
• The name of Harry Potter character, Mrs. Norris, is J.K. Rowling’s nod to Jane Austen’s Mrs. Norris the officious, skinflint sister of Lady Beltram and reveals Austen’s influence on Rowling’s writing.
• Mansfield Park was the first of her novels that was not a revision of an earlier work.

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THE AENEID OF VIRGIL

Written by Virgil

Translated by Allen Mandelbaum

“Trojans, do not trust in the horse. Whatever it may be, I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.”
—Book II, lines 69-70, page 30

Fun Facts

• The Aeneid was written in a time of major political and social change, when many Romans’ faith in the greatness of Rome was severely crumbling.
• The main character, Aeneas, first appears in the Iliad. Virgil took the stories and expanded them.
• Legend says that Virgil would write just three lines of the poem a day. Regardless of whether this is true, it is commonly accepted that Virgil had unlikely been able to finish the poem himself especially on that schedule.

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