Twelfth Night
Argo Classics
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About this listen
William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic prose and verse read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly remastered stories are now available to download for the first time.
‘If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.’
A comedic romance of mistaken identity, Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, splitting up Viola and her twin brother, Sebastian. Alone in a strange land, Viola disguises herself as a male servant, Cesario, in order to work for the Duke Orsino. Orsino is in love with Lady Olivia, but it is Cesario that Olivia falls for. A farcical tale of misplaced love, confusion, gender-swapping and aspiration, Twelfth Night remains one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and inventive comedies.
All of the Shakespeare plays within the ARGO Classics catalogue are performed by the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. The Marlowe was founded in 1907 with a mission to focus on effective delivery of verse, respect the integrity of texts, and rescue neglected plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the less performed plays of Shakespeare himself. The Marlowe has performed annually at Cambridge Arts Theatre since its opening in 1936 and continues to produce some of the finest actors of their generations.
Thurston Dart, Professor of Music at London University and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, directed the music for this production.
The full cast includes: Derek Godfrey; Patrick Garland; Peter Orr; John Barton; Ian Lang; Tony Whitehead; Patrick Wymark; Robert Eddison; Tony Church; David Coombes; Peter Pears; Jill Balco; Dorothy Tutin; Prunella Scales.
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Detailed and satisfying
- By Tad Davis on 02-24-16
By: James Shapiro
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
- 1599
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: James Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Abridged
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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
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Note!--Abridged version
- By Scott on 01-05-16
By: James Shapiro
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Queer City
- Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day
- By: Peter Ackroyd
- Narrated by: Will Watt
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Queer City, the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way - through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population. In Roman Londinium, the city was dotted with lupanaria (“wolf dens” or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels), and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks, and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure.
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Be Gay, Do Crimes: A History
- By Franklin on 10-13-18
By: Peter Ackroyd
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The Roman Way
- By: Edith Hamilton
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different from that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days, and far livelier.
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Not so bad
- By steve on 04-25-11
By: Edith Hamilton
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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God’s Secretaries
- The Making of the King James Bible
- By: Adam Nicolson
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment “Englishness” and the English language had come into its first passionate maturity. Boisterous, elegant, subtle, majestic, finely nuanced, sonorous, and musical, the English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own reach and scope than any before or since. It is a form of the language that drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.
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Not what I was expecting
- By Greg on 12-29-13
By: Adam Nicolson
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The Misanthrope
- By: Molière, Richard Wilbur - translator
- Narrated by: Brian Bedford, J. D. Cullum, Sarah Drew, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 50 mins
- Original Recording
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This timeless comedy of manners is considered one of Molière's most probing and mature works. While it's still an exemplar of 17th century farce, Molière went beyond his usual comic inventiveness to create a world of rich, complex characters, especially in the cynical title character Alceste, played here by the Tony Award-winning actor Brian Bedford.
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Good play, great translation, good performance
- By Timoteo on 03-08-18
By: Molière, and others
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Tristram Shandy
- By: Laurence Sterne
- Narrated by: Anton Lesser
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Laurence Sterne’s most famous novel is a biting satire of literary conventions and contemporary 18th-century values. Renowned for its parody of established narrative techniques, Tristram Shandyis commonly regarded as the forerunner of avant-garde fiction. Tristram’s characteristic digressions on a whole range of unlikely subjects (including battle strategy and noses!) are endlessly surprising and make this one of Britain’s greatest comic achievements.
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Like discovering Frank Zappa in 250 years
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-14
By: Laurence Sterne
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
What listeners say about Twelfth Night
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- resol
- 06-30-22
Shakespeare Musical
maybe the most musical of the Shakespeare canonical 37. absolute joy. you may want to follow along with the text if the play to maximize enjoyment of the song portions of text particularly the closing lines of this performance.
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