If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the Late Middle Ages, Neville Coghill's famous translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its pages are to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their inne...

Nora, a banker's pampered and petted wife, forges a signature to obtain money for her ailing husband. The play's theme, touting a woman's independence, shocked audiences at the time of its premiere.

Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first fully intact philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In it, the respected Greek sage offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (which the Greeks understood to literally mean "making"), examining its "first principles" and ...