Customer Reviews

Great Speeches and Soliloquies (Classic Literature with Classical Music)

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DO NOT buy the audiobook download of this book. You will get a 2-hour audio file with no indexing of any kind. You will not even know what soliloquies are in the file, let alone where to find them.

Everyone knows that William Shakespeare wrote a great many speeches. Everyone knows that Hamlet had a soliloquy, that there was a big famous speech about a stage (or something) in ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, that Romeo and Juliet had a "balcony scene," but this is not enough to spread the genius of Shakespeare throughout the world! This book contains nearly all the speeches ever written by this "phantom of the stage" and when all you people who have not read very much Shakespeare and think it's boring, I assure you this will change your mind. You will most likely be memorizing all of the speeches and buying all Shakespeares plays or sonnets! Buy this book and am positive that you will not regret it!

Although I've never heard of these actors before, they all do a very nice job on the readings. They are all English (Americans cannot speak Shakespeare for some reason) and with the Royal Shakespeare Company which should explain why. As opposed to most Shakespeare collections, these readings are not scenes, but just individual speeches which stand well on their own as poetry.
There is a very brief, one sentence introduction to every speech. My only quibble is that there's a musical interlude between every speech which gets a little tiring after a while.

I ordered the Great Speeches CD and got the CD for "Grimm's Fairy Tales" instead. There must have been a mix-up at the factory. I guess it's difficult to match-up sleeve and CD.
So after this happened to me twice, I decided to download the title. The speeches are excellent and worth listening to. The 18th century Baroque music, however, is really overdoing it and doesn't fit in with early 17th century Shakespearean drama.