Smart Aleck's Guide to Shakespeare

Know more about Shakespeare than your teacher! Four guides in one volume, one for each of the plays most often assigned to students.

For generations, students have been introduced to Shakespeare, the “greatest writer of all time,” by being forced to spend a month copying down vocabulary words and diagraming iambic pentameter while listening to Hairy Nate, the mouth breather in the back row of their English class, read out loud from Julius Caesar at a rate of four words per minute. It’s no wonder that Shakespeare has a reputation for being boring! Well, the famous Smart Aleck Staff is ready to help all you back row hooligans go into class knowing more about Shakespeare than most of your teachers, directors and acting coaches! Whether you’re a Shakespeare newbie or a scholar who just enjoys cracking jokes about Harold Bloom, THE SMART ALECK’S GUIDE TO SHAKESPEARE series is just as informative and hilarious as their acclaimed SMART ALECK’S GUIDE TO AMERICAN HISTORY (Random House 2009).

The Shakespeare 101 guide alone contains more than 20 illustrations and an ACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS, including chapters on….

… The important roles of sex, violence, and poop in Elizabethan life.
… Shakespeare’s mysterious “lost plays.”
… Shakespeare’s rowdy friends.
… The Elizabethan theatre scene
… What you need to know about the English language in Shakespeare’s era.
… Words you’re likely to run into in Shakespeare (“wherefore,” “anon,” “hie,” “fain,” “prithee,” “sluttery,” and others that are used differently now, when they’re used at all).
… Things modern scholars fight about (watch out for flying folding chairs)
… Did Shakespeare really look like he always does in paintings?
… Tips on reading (and enjoying) the plays
… How to spot the sex puns and fart jokes
… A few of our favorite monologues

It’s everything you need to take over the class in one short (42,000 word) book - without resorting to showing drawings of Shakespeare wearing sunglasses or rewriting Hamlet to make it sound like the instructions to an NES skateboarding game from 1991.

This specially-priced TRAGEDIES MEGAPACK contains our Shakespeare 101 book, plus the guides to ROMEO AND JULIET, HAMLET, MACBETH, and JULIUS CAESAR, the four plays most commonly assigned to students, combining them into one MASSIVE (260,000 word) volume. Each of those guides contains a summary, character guide, history and background info, tangents about Muppets and Star Wars, and a scene-by-scene summary and analysis, with the full text of each scene, highlighting particularly good lines, and making fun of paintings of the characters wearing stupid hats throughout. For students who don't just want to pass the test, but who want to be experts before the class even starts, and understand WHY these plays are still so revered. Other study guides just want to help you pass the test. We want you to love these plays as much as we do.