Discover an invigorating new perspective on the life and work of William Shakespeare
The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare delivers a fresh and exciting new take on the life of William Shakespeare, offering readers a biography that brings to the foreground his working life as a poet, playwright, and actor. It also explores the nature of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, and family, and asks important questions about the stories we tell about Shakespeare based on the evidence we actually have about the man himself.
The book is written using scholarly citations and references, but with an approachable style suitable for readers with little or no background knowledge of Shakespeare or the era in which he lived. The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare asks provocative questions about the playwright-poet’s preoccupation with gender roles and sexuality, and explores why it is so challenging to ascertain his political and religious allegiances. Conservative or radical? Misogynist or proto-feminist? A lover of men or women or both? Patriot or xenophobe? This introduction to Shakespeare’s life and works offers no simple answers, but recognizes a man intensely responsive to the world around him, a playwright willing and able to collaborate with others and able to collaborate with others, and, of course, his exceptional, perhaps unique, contribution to literature in English.
The book covers the entirety of William Shakespeare’s life (1564-1616), taking him from his childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon to his success in the theatre world of London and then back to his home town and comfortable retirement. The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare sets his achievement as a writer within the dangerous, vibrant cultural world that was Elizabethan and Jacobean England, revealing a writer’s life of frequent collaboration, occasional crisis, but always of profound creativity.
Perfect for undergraduate students in Literature, Drama, Theatre Studies, History, and Cultural Studies courses, The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare will also earn a place in the libraries of students interested in Gender Studies and Creative Writing.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments vi
Prologue viii
Chapter One 1
Chapter Two 14
Chapter Three 31
Chapter Four 49
Chapter Five 69
Chapter Six 87
Chapter Seven 106
Chapter Eight 129
Notes 149
References 160
Index 170
About the author
Anna Beer, Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford is a cross-disciplinary author and researcher with a focus on literature, history, music, and creative writing. She is the author of several biographies, including John Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot and Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music.
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