Martin Geeson
21 libri letti per LibriVox
- A Woman of No Importance EnglishWilde lets his idle aristocrats trade epigrams for two acts, and Lord Illingworth is horribly quotable, then the play turns serious when Mrs Arbuthnot's old secret surfaces. If you want pure froth you might resist the melodrama, but the wit alone earns the evening.
- Antigone EnglishAn hour's read that leaves a bruise: a young woman buries her brother knowing it will kill her, and Creon digs in until it costs him everything. If you like arguments where both sides have a point and neither will bend, this is the one.
- Antony and Cleopatra EnglishThese two aren't young lovers, they're middle-aged, vain, magnificent messes who keep wrecking empires over each other, and you half want to shake them. Stay for Enobarbus, the dry-eyed friend whose barge speech about Cleopatra is worth the whole play.
- The sentences alone are worth it, long baroque things that wander and land. You get his hungry teenage years on the London streets with poor Ann, then the dreams turn strange and terrifying.
- Coriolanus EnglishYou get a fiercely strange tragedy about pride, hunger, and the impossibility of speaking to people you despise. Coriolanus is magnificent and maddening, while Volumnia’s hard, hungry love gives the play its deepest ache; the Roman politics can feel blunt, but the language cuts.
- Edward II EnglishMarlowe writes a king who wrecks his kingdom for love of Gaveston and somehow makes you pity him more as he loses everything. It's bleak, cruel in places, and the deposition scenes cut deep.
- Edward III EnglishYou get a rough, episodic history play with flashes of Shakespearean energy, especially in Edward’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury and the Black Prince’s battlefield speeches. It’s uneven and not wholly Shakespeare’s, but the mix of courtly temptation, war, and sudden moral seriousness makes it an intriguing afternoon read.
- Henry VIII EnglishYou’ll like it for its grand, ceremonial feel and the sharp human cost beneath the pageantry, especially in Katherine of Aragon’s dignity and Wolsey’s sudden collapse. It’s episodic and more interested in public power than intimate character, so expect a stately history play rather than another Hamlet.
- Oedipus at Colonus EnglishSophocles wrote this near ninety, and it shows in the best way: a blind, exhausted Oedipus finally finding a place that will take him, with Antigone at his elbow. Slower and stranger than Oedipus Rex, but the ending has a quiet awe that stays with you.
- Philoctetes EnglishShort enough to read in an evening, and it stays with you: a man abandoned on an island for ten years with a stinking wound, and young Neoptolemus slowly realizing he can't stomach the lie Odysseus wants him to tell. If you like watching a conscience wake up, this is it.
- Poetry EnglishFair warning, these are hard poems, gas attacks and boys dying in the mud, but Owen writes them with such tenderness that you come out feeling more human, not less. Strange Meeting alone, two soldiers talking in some underworld, will sit with you for weeks.
- The Alchemist EnglishThree con artists set up shop in a plague-emptied London house and fleece everyone who knocks, and watching Face and Subtle improvise faster and faster as the marks pile up is genuinely funny. The Jacobean language takes some chewing, but the scheming underneath is pure farce.
- The Duchess of Malfi EnglishYou get a dark, ferociously theatrical tragedy where the Duchess’s private marriage collides with her brothers’ vicious control, and Bosola watches it all with a bitter, uneasy intelligence. The plot turns brutal, but Webster’s language and the play’s strange flashes of tenderness keep it from becoming mere gloom.
- Fair warning, nothing much happens: a bored prince escapes paradise to figure out how to live, and every answer he collects falls apart in his hands. But Johnson writes sentences you'll want to copy out, and Imlac's speech on why nobody can be a poet is worth the whole slim book.
- The Mysteries of Udolpho EnglishYou follow Emily St Aubert from sunlit France into the oppressive corridors of Udolpho, where music, shadows, and a black veil keep your nerves pleasantly busy. It’s long, ornate, and sometimes dramatically overwrought, but the atmosphere is so carefully sustained that the castle starts haunting you too.
- You get why people still quote it once Mephistopheles calmly admits he's in hell right now, standing there. The middle sags into slapstick with popes and horse traders, honestly, but Faustus watching his last hour tick away is worth the whole slim thing.
- The Way of the World EnglishThe plot is a tangle (everyone agrees, don't fight it), but you read this for Mirabell and Millamant bargaining over marriage like two lawyers who happen to be in love. If you like your romance conducted entirely through wit, this is the good stuff.
- The Wild Duck EnglishYou get a darkly funny, claustrophobic family drama where Gregers Werle’s hunger for absolute truth collides with Hjalmar Ekdal’s comforting self-deceptions. The wild duck in the attic feels oddly central, and the play keeps asking whether honesty heals people or simply gives suffering a cleaner name.
- The Winter’s Tale EnglishYou get Shakespeare at his strangest here: Leontes’ jealousy makes the early scenes painfully claustrophobic, then Paulina’s fierce intelligence and a sudden pastoral brightness change the air. It’s uneven and openly theatrical, but its movement from damage toward forgiveness stays with you.
- Timon of Athens EnglishYou’ll appreciate its strange, abrasive energy: Timon’s lavish generosity curdles into furious contempt, while Apemantus needles him with the honesty nobody else will risk. It’s a jagged, unfinished-feeling play, but if you like Shakespeare when he’s bitter, funny, and morally unruly, it stays with you.
- Unspoken Sermons saggistica EnglishYou read it slowly, letting MacDonald circle the same fierce idea from different angles: God’s holiness is consuming love, not courtroom punishment. The sermons can feel dense and repetitive, but “The Child in the Midst” and “The Consuming Fire” repay patience if you’re drawn to theology that feels lived rather than merely argued.