Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) PDF Download

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441

View

Book Description
Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393050578
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460

View

Book Description
A portrait of Elizabethan England and how it contributed to the making of William Shakespeare discusses how he moved to London lacking money, connections, and a formal education and rose to became his age's foremost playwright.

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446442594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

View

Book Description
Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age. Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's unfolding imaginative generosity - his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done. Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226306674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

View

Book Description
With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Greenblatt, author of the bestselling "Will in the World," shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes as scripture, monarch, and God, and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them.

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
"Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable."—Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge them.

Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061840904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 620

View

Book Description
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award What accounts for Shakespeare’s transformation from talented poet and playwright to one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this gripping account, James Shapiro sets out to answer this question, "succeed[ing] where others have fallen short." (Boston Globe) 1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen. James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 1588363481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—including, of course, its theater. Then Kermode focuses on Shakespeare himself and his career, all in the context of the time in which he lived. Kermode reads each play against the backdrop of its probable year of composition, providing new historical insights into Shakspeare’s characters, themes, and sources. The result is an important, lasting, and concise companion guide to the works of Shakespeare by one of our most eminent literary scholars.

Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588367819
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 495

View

Book Description
“One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.” In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0593230329
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 2532

View

Book Description
The newly revised, wonderfully authoritative First Folio of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by acclaimed Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen and endorsed by the world-famous Royal Shakespeare Company Combining cutting-edge textual editing, superb annotations and commentary, a readable design, and bonus features for students, theater professionals, and general readers, this landmark edition sets a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century and features 48 pages of new material. Edited by a brilliant team of “younger generation” Shakespearean scholars from the First Folio originally assembled by Shakespeare’s own acting company, this edition of the “Complete Works” corrects centuries of errors and textual variations that have evolved since the book’s publication in 1623, and includes modern glossaries designed for twenty-first-century readers and new editorial stage directions clearly distinguished from Folio directions.

Author: Paul Collins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596911956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
A history of the Bard's competitively pursued First Folio traces the author's travels from the site of a Sotheby auction to regions in Asia, throughout which he investigated the roles played by those who have sought and owned the Folios.