Prospero, wise Duke of Milan, has been deposed by Antonio his wicked brother and exiled with his daughter Miranda to a mysterious island. But Prospero possesses supernatural powers. Aided by the...

Pip is an orphan, brought up by his sister and her husband, the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. One evening, while visiting his parents' graves, he has a shocking encounter with an escaped convict...

The Yorkists have emerged victorious from the civil wars and Edward IV wears the English crown. But Edward's misshapen brother Richard harbours kingly ambitions and will stop at nothing to achieve...

The acclaimed BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Anthony Trollope's classic story of provincial life.

One of the most respected, successful chroniclers of nineteenth-century life, Anthony...

Young Antipholus of Syracuse is seaching the world for his identical twin brother, separated from him at birth. With him is his servant Dromio, who lost his twin brother at the same time. The pair...

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, undergoes a tyrant's fury, storm and shipwreck. He wins love and suffers loss, but what is lost may also be found. With the ancient poet Gower acting as narrator, we...

The story follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted her, the beautiful, upstanding Delia, and her true mother, her plain, unmarried ‘aunt’ Charlotte, who...

An anthology of 39 British and American poets, from Shakespeare and Dunne to Whitman and Yeats.

Hannah Gordon, Amanda Root and Michael Williams star in this sparkling BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation.Fanny Price, the timid eldest daughter of a large and struggling family, is nine years...

Cousin Bette is one of the best loved and most admired of Honore de Balzac's novels. A tale of seductive women and philandering men, of passionate affairs and spiralling debts, Cousin Bette paints...

At the end of a dinner party, the remaining guests drink wine and tell stories of their first love. For one of them, it will be a dark journey into his past, reawakening unbearable memories of his...

The brave warrior Macbeth allows himself to be persuaded by Lady Macbeth, his wife, to slay good King Duncan and seize the throne of Scotland for himself. Macbeth achieves his ambition, but one...

Telling his followers he is leaving the city on affairs of state, the Duke of Vienna appoints the puritanical Angelo to govern in his absence. Will Angelo prove as virtuous as he seems once power...

In this BBC Radio adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's spectacular one-man show, Simon Callow portrays both Charles Dickens and many of his best-loved characters, from Mr Micawber and Bill Sikes to...

A BBC Radio dramatisation of Mary Shelley's classic tale. Frankenstein was written by a teenager and the story has all the energy and emotional intensity of this time of life. It's a thrilling,...