Elizabethan English

From the coral reefs of Barbados to the jungles and fabled cities of the Orinoco and on to the great sea battle with the Spanish Armada, this vibrant novel captures the daring spirit of Elizabethan adventurers who sailed with Sir Francis Drake.

S. J. Parris returns with the next Giordano Bruno mystery, set inside Queen Elizabeth’s palace and steeped in period atmospherics and the strange workings of the occult. It is the year of the Great Conjunction, when the two most powerful planets, Jupiter and Saturn, align - an astrologi­cal phenomenon that occurs once every thousand years and heralds the death of one age and the dawn of another. The streets of London are abuzz with predictions of horrific events to come, possibly even the death of Queen Elizabeth.

Jack and Annie are whisked back to Elizabethan England where they meet the Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare, and luckily for them, he is desperate for two small actors for his latest play! An exciting adventure and a wonderful introduction to Shakespeare.

Frances Walsingham is the only surviving child of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham. Better educated than most men, her father arranges her marriage to warrior poet Sir Philip Sidney. After Philip Sidney is killed in battle, Frances becomes Countess of Essex, and is banished from court after her husband Sir Robert Devereaux’s rebellion against the queen.

When Maeve McQuaid loses her boyfriend and her gardening job in one fell swoop, fate intervenes in the shape of Beth, an elderly lady carrying a gap-year-size backpack. She turns out to be the owner of the mysterious Druid's Oak Farm in North Yorkshire and offers her a job. The farm is an artist's community which has become tired and run down, much like its inhabitants. The Elizabethan building needs to be saved but Beth is slowly going bankrupt. Can Maeve make a formal garden from an overgrown shambles? Can her enthusiasm lift everyone out of their lethargy or will they rise up against her...

Grace O'Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself—another powerful woman in a man's world—Grace's life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumored she had become intelligencer for the queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.

London, winter of 1589. The city is alive with intrigue, and anticipation. The players of Lord Strange’s Men are rehearsing a daring new play, penned by one of their promising young actors, William Shakespeare. But excitement turns to disaster when the authorities shutter the theatre over a trivial offense, plunging Will into uncertainty and despair. Determined to press on, he begins crafting a grisly revenge tragedy—Titus Andronicus—hoping to sell it to another troupe. But before he can do so, his entire collection of playscripts is stolen. His reputation, his career—everything is ...

Why did Henry VIII marry six times? Why did Anne Boleyn have to die? Why did Elizabeth I's courtiers hail her as a goddess come to earth? The dramas of courtly love have captivated centuries of readers and dreamers. Yet too often they're dismissed as something existing only in books and song—those old legends of King Arthur and chivalric fantasy. Not so. In this ground-breaking history, Sarah Gristwood reveals the way courtly love made and marred the Tudor dynasty.

Fire, Burn! is the sequel to Chris Crowcroft’s highly successful and well reviewed historical thriller Shakespeare in Trouble, featuring the Elizabethan investigator, Richard Palmer. It is now 1605 and intelligence sources are warning that Catholic terrorists, angry at a new regime’s reluctance to grant religious toleration, are planning a violent event, but not who or when. Robert Cecil, Chief Minister under the new King, James Stuart, calls Richard Palmer in for a second time. Palmer must infiltrate the insurgent network, including its underground Jesuit priests led by Fr. Henry ...

In the heat of their midsummer night’s dream, they tasted the ecstasy of a love more exciting than any staged masquerade. Banished from Queen Elizabeth’s court for a murder he didn’t commit, Nicholas Leighton escaped capture by assuming a new appearance and identity. Joining Shakespeare’s acting company he was thrust into the dangerous and deceptive world of London’s theater, where illusions defied the senses and false identities were commonplace. Betrayed by the golden-haired beauty he had pursued, Nicholas vowed he would trust no woman, until lovely Alandra Thatcher, the stage ...

For almost two decades before her execution at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was a prisoner. From her chambers, she wrote countless letters, many encrypted using complex ciphers to prevent her communications from being intercepted. In this way, she used language to exert her will and her influence, even while incarcerated. More than four hundred years after Mary's death, the discovery of further encoded letters has led to renewed interest in the breadth of her correspondence while in captivity.

What if you were asked to die for someone you had never met? The Catholic Queen, Bloody Mary, hates her sister and rival, the Princess Elizabeth. To protect the Protestant princess, a loyal nobleman spirits her into hiding, leaving a base-born lookalike in her place. Bess Neville is King Henry's daughter, too, but she wasn't born to the gilded halls of power. She grew up poor, raised in a shabby house on the Thames, abused by the aunt who resented having to raise her sister's orphaned brat, but Bess bears enough of a resemblance to her namesake for ambitious men to exploit. Bess risks a ...

For many Catholics, the Elizabethan "Golden Age" was an alien concept. Following the criminalization of their religion by Elizabeth I, nearly 200 Catholics were executed, and many more wasted away in prison during her reign. Torture was used more than at any other time in England's history. While some bowed to the pressure of the government and new church, publicly conforming to acts of Protestant worship, others did not - and quickly found themselves living in a state of siege.

In this remarkable biography, Carolly Erickson brings Elizabeth I to life and allows us to see her as a living, breathing, elegant, flirtatious, diplomatic, violent, arrogant, and outrageous woman who commands our attention, fascination, and awe. With the special skill for which she is acclaimed, Carolly Erickson electrifies the senses as she evokes with total fidelity the brilliant colors of Elizabethan clothing and jewelry, the texture of tapestries, and even the close, perfumed air of castle rooms. Erickson demonstrates her extraordinary ability to discern and bring to life psychological and physical reality.

The original recounting of the events from Sir Francis Drake himself. Listen to Drake's piratical raid on the Spanish Main and the various battle and adventures therein.

Alice Spencer was born in 1560 to a family on the rise. Her grandfather had amassed a sizeable estate of fertile grazing land and made a small fortune in sheep farming, allowing him to purchase a simple but distinguished manor house called Althorp. With her sizable dowry, Alice married the heir to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in the country, eventually becoming the Countess of Derby. Though she enjoyed modest renown, it wasn’t until her husband’s sudden death that Alice and her family’s future changed forever.

"Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same." These were the heartbreaking words of a 17-year-old girl, Lady Jane Grey, as she stood on the scaffold awaiting death on a cold February morning in 1554. Minutes later, her head was struck from her body with a single stroke of a heavy ax. Her death for high treason sent shock waves through the Tudor world and served as a gruesome reminder to all who aspired to a crown that the ax could fall at any time.

The writing of sonnets was a craze among poets of the 1590s. The sonnet, an Italian form, was introduced into England by Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), who modelled himself on Petrarch, and by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). It was Surrey who invented what is now known as the Shakespearean sonnet - three differently rhyming quatrains and a clinching couplet. This collection of Elizabethan sonnets and lyrics were recorded by Anthony Quayle.

An aging, vain, lonely, pretentious and failed indie writer is forced to give a glowing, five-star review to 'Vampire Odyssey', the worst book ever written. "Not your typical gothic tale—brace yourself for a hilariously twisted parody that will have you laughing from dusk till dawn! This book turns the vampire genre on its head with wit, humor, and a touch of absurdity. Dive in for a wild, irreverent ride!" --Christine Jax, author of Who's Building the Ark? How to Manage Through Hell and High Water

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ "Bad Blood is a fantastic historical fiction novel that does not shy away from the dark complications of the world," - Reedsy Discovery A gripping fast-paced historical fiction adventure set in rebellious Ireland in the 1590s. Eunan Maguire lives in a small village in Fermanagh. He is mistreated by his parents and then taken to Enniskillen as a hostage to ensure his father’s loyalty. He returns after being trained as a Galloglass warrior to confront his parents and to ensure his father pledges to the prospective new Maguire. But before he can do that the English raid ...