Shakespeare Audio Collection As You Like It Much Ado About Nothing Winters Tale Produced by the Shakespeare Recording Society in 1999, this seven CD set features three full-cast, unabridged performances of As You Like It (starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Michell), Much Ado About Nothing (starring Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts), and The Winter's Tale (starring Sir John Gielgud and Dame Peggy Ashcroft). These plays will move and delight Shakespeare aficionados everywhere. This is a new, unplayed without original shrinkwrap box set of three complete plays offered on 7 discs from performances during the early 1960's. Shakespeare's world comes alive in these three theatrical performances with all the passion, wit, and profound human insight of their brilliant creator. As You Like It is a quintessential Shakespearean comedy, complete with a loquacious clown, lovers, disguises, rifts, and reconciliations all within the atmospheric confines of the enchanted Forest of Arden. As the title suggests, As You Like It is a play in which everyone gets their way, where sinners are redeemed, and love holds sway over all. And because it is Shakespeare, even so light a comedy contains a wealth of keen observations about humanity in general, and in particular about the age-old tension between so-called civilized society and the state of nature from which it evolved. No less poetically accomplished than Shakespeare's more serious works, As You Like It is a stimulating literary pleasure from start to finish. Recording of the 1962 cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Keith Michell, and Stanley Holloway. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare created one of the greatest verbal sparring matches in all of literature, echoes of which can be heard in the sophisticated comic dialogue of such late masters as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward. Throughout the play, the proud, would be lovers Beatrice and Benedick circle each other warily, and as they draw closer and closer to their inevitable union, their scathing witticisms and sly innuendos reach a feverish intensity that befits the passionate longing that they both they only seek to deny. Much Ado About Nothing is at once a sobering examination of dishonesty and deception, and a boisterous celebration of that overwhelming natural phenomenon we call love. Recording of the 1963 cast features Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts. The Winter's Tale was one of the very last plays Shakespeare wrote, a moving romance whose themes are sin, forgiveness, death, rebirth, and the power of time and nature to heal all wounds. Based on a novella by Shakespeare's enemy and archrival Robert Greene, The Winter's Tale introduces Perdita, perhaps The Bard's most richly symbolic character. At times tragic, at times humorous, but always entertaining and instructive, The Winter's Tale is a complex and rewarding work by the greatest dramatist of all time. Recording of the 1961 cast starring Sir John Gielgud and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is considered England's national poet with surviving works consisting of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.