Kirby
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Hamlet
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser, full cast
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 203
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 89
Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies. In writing this extraordinary play, Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly 2,000 years - you would have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity. This production features the voice of Anton Lesser as Hamlet along with a full cast.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Copy
- By Kirby on 11-27-03
- Hamlet
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser, full cast
Excellent Copy
Reviewed: 11-27-03
This is a first-rate production of the play. It's clean, complete, and well-acted. Music and sound-effects are tasteful. At times, it might be a little bit too quiet, say, for airplanes, but these moments are few and far between. Overal, I wanted an audible copy I could keep coming back to like the text, and that's precisely what they've delivered.
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28 people found this helpful
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Classic American Poetry
- By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others
- Narrated by: Garrick Hagon, Liza Ross, William Hootkins, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 31
Walt Whitman said, "...poetry is the voice of the nation, expressing its deepest concerns, ambitions and longings," which is certainly true of the great classic poetry of America. This wide-ranging anthology, from the earliest poets of the 16th century to the present day, reflects the changing preoccupations and visions of Americans, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, and more.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Just dawdle
- By Kirby on 11-27-03
Just dawdle
Reviewed: 11-27-03
I found the selections of this recording tedious. There are a few classics: the best-known of Emily Dickenson, Frost's "The Road Less Travelled", "O Captain, My Captain" by Whitman. However, beyond the few gems, it's one 19th century forced rhyme scheme after another. Old, dull images, and boring language--all the sorts of things the best American poets of the 20th century rejected. It's rather sad, then, that some of the best American poetry to this date--Eliot, Stevens, Pound, etc. is passed over in favor of patriotic tripe and period pieces.
What's more, even the good poems are painful to listen to because of pompous, un-insightful narrators. The quality of the readings is so bad I found it difficult to finish any single track. One is reminded of Hamlet or Cyrano's famous diatrabs on delivery. These readers are "mouthers" of the worst sort. Awful awful awful!
Unless you're looking for a collection of poems to listen to while saluting the flag and consulting Reader's Digest, skip this one.
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44 people found this helpful