Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece

by William Shakespeare

Read by David Burke, Eve Best, Clare Corbett, Benjamin Soames, and Oliver Le Sueur

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These two great poems date from Shakespeare’s early years and are full of passion and invention. In Venus and Adonis, the goddess of love pleads with the beautiful boy to submit to her advances and become her love – but he only wants to hunt boar. In the more serious Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare draws on the Roman take of the Emperor Tarquin’s desire for Lucrece and its tragic consequencies. These poems give prominent parts to the two heroines, and Clare Corbett and Eve Best shine.

Speak the Speech...
In a talk given at the 2008 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, David Timson, director of four Naxos AudioBooks Shakespeare recordings and author of Shakespeare Stories, surveys the changing styles of Shakespeare performance through recordings starting with Henry Irving in the 1890s through to Kenneth Branagh in the twenty-first century.

Click on the link below to listen to/download the files. Alternatively, control-click (Mac), or right-click (PC) on a link, and choose ‘Save linked file as...’ to save the file to your computer.

Speak the Speech... (MP3, 58 mins, 20 MB)
Accompanying notes (PDF, 120 KB)

  

3 CDs • Running Time: c.4 hours • ISBN: 962-634-429-6 / 978-962-634-429-3 • Catalogue no: NA342912 • RRP: £13.99