Notable Classics: Media

Dracula The tortured journey of the devastatingly seductive Transylvanian Prince as he moves from Eastern Europe to 19th century London in search of his reincarnated long-lost love.

Emma Emma Woodhouse is a young woman who, having engineered the marriage of her companion, turns her attention toward making a match for the local vicar and her new protegée, Harriet Smith. Her one voice of reason and restraint is Mr. Knightley, who has known her since she was a child and who watches her behaviour with wry amusement and sometimes with real anger. Emma presides over the small provincial world of Highbury with enthusiasm, but she will find it is all too easy to confuse good intentions with self-gratification.

In search of Shakespeare This four-part series explores the life of the world's greatest and most famous writer. Mixing travel, adventure, interviews, documentary, and live action sequences with the Royal Shakespeare Company, it presents a biography of one Elizabethan: his life, family and friendships, triumphs and disasters, loves and his losses. Viewers see how Shakespeare's life and work were shaped by his times, how he created some of the greatest literature in the world, and why he is still loved. These films reveal how Shakespeare sums up English history--and the English character too--more than any other person. Decent, humane, open minded, tolerant, witty, bawdy, sexy, diffident, guarded, skeptical, wary of any political system, identifying himself with the "Other" in his great portrayals of black people, women, the poor, Jews-- even evil people--Shakespeare is an artist born out of turbulent times. But as his old friend, Ben Jonson said, "He was not of an age, but for all time."

Macbeth Adaptation of the stage production which relocates the action to a nameless 20th-century underground facility, offering a parable of the quest for power in the modern world.

Mary Shelley: the birth of Frankenstein "This program offers a fresh exploration of her novel, Frankenstein, focusing on how Shelley's personal life influenced the book and mirrored it afterwards. Along with reenactments of scenes from her classic and dramatizations of her life, the program draws from a wealth of primary sources, including readings from her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Mary Shelley's personal letters, as well as those of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron"--Container.

Sense and sensibility Tells of the Dashwood sisters, sensible Elinor and passionate Marianne, whose chances at marriage seem doomed by their family's sudden loss of fortune.