Download or read book Shakespeare s England written by R. E Pritchard and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2003-04-24 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual excerpts from 16th- and 17th-century writing. "Shakespeare's England" brings to life the variety, the energy and the harsh reality of England at this time. Providing a portrait of the age, it includes extracts from a wide variety of writers, taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. These include William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Common Prayers written by Daniel Swift and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Societies and entire nations draw their identities from certain founding documents, whether charters, declarations, or manifestos. The Book of Common Prayer figures as one of the most crucial in the history of the English-speaking peoples. First published in 1549 to make accessible the devotional language of the late Henry the VIII's new church, the prayer book was a work of monumental religious, political, and cultural importance. Within its rituals, prescriptions, proscriptions, and expressions were fought the religious wars of the age of Shakespeare. This diminutive book--continuously reformed and revised--was how that age defined itself. In Shakespeare's Common Prayers, Daniel Swift makes dazzling and original use of this foundational text, employing it as an entry-point into the works of England's most celebrated writer. Though commonly neglected as a source for Shakespeare's work, Swift persuasively and conclusively argues that the Book of Common Prayer was absolutely essential to the playwright. It was in the Book's ambiguities and its fierce contestations that Shakespeare found the ready elements of drama: dispute over words and their practical consequences, hope for sanctification tempered by fear of simple meaninglessness, and the demand for improvised performance as compensation for the failure of language to fulfill its promises. What emerges is nothing less than a portrait of Shakespeare at work: absorbing, manipulating, reforming, and struggling with the explosive chemistry of word and action that comprised early modern liturgy. Swift argues that the Book of Common Prayer mediates between the secular and the devotional, producing a tension that makes Shakespeare's plays so powerful and exceptional. Tracing the prayer book's lines and motions through As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, and particularly Macbeth, Swift reveals how the greatest writer of the age--of perhaps any age--was influenced and guided by its most important book.
Download or read book Elizabethan News Pamphlets written by Paul J. Voss and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabethan News Pamphlets is the first book to explore comprehensively the production and dissemination of the Elizabethan news pamphlets published between 1589-1593. This book collects, defines, and investigates the nearly 60 extant news quartos, and also examines their relationship to the birth of journalism, the writings of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Spenser, the rise of national identity, and the complexities of national identity. This archival work begins with the actions of the charismatic Henry of Navarre. After Navarre became King of France in 1589, scores of printed documents presented his struggles with the Catholic League. The considerable involvement of English soldiers in the wars created a captive market for the news pamphlets. Elizabethans readily purchased the news quartos and soon Navarre became the most widely known non-English personality of the day. The pamphlets play an important role in the history of journalism and publications. The roots of journalism took hold during this period as a sophisticated notion of objectivity and soon serial publications resulted from this consistent, regular publication. The sudden end to the wars in 1593 ended both the flood of news reports and serial publications. The documents also provide a significant contribution to our understanding of English national identity. While scholars have studied the writings of numerous "discursive communities" and how these communities viewed England, the writings about war have received far less scrutiny. This book examines scores of archival documents in constructing a social, literary, religious, and political history of the 1590s.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Library written by Stuart Kells and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tantalizing true story of one of literature’s most enduring enigmas is at the heart of this “lively, even sprightly book” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)—the quest to find the personal library of the world’s greatest writer. Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world’s most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare’s library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the bard’s manuscripts, books or letters has ever been found. The search for Shakespeare’s library is much more than a treasure hunt. Knowing what the Bard read informs our reading of his work, and it offers insight into the mythos of Shakespeare and the debate around authorship. The library’s fate has profound implications for literature, for national and cultural identity, and for the global Shakespeare industry. It bears on fundamental principles of art, identity, history, meaning and truth. Unfolding the search like the mystery story that it is, acclaimed author Stuart Kells follows the trail of the hunters, taking us through different conceptions of the library and of the man himself. Entertaining and enlightening, Shakespeare’s Library is a captivating exploration of one of literature’s most enduring enigmas. "An engaging and provocative contribution to the unending world of Shakespeariana . . . An enchanting work that bibliophiles will savor and Shakespeare fans adore." ―Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Shakespeare the Elizabethan written by Alfred Leslie Rowse and published by George Weidenfeld & Nicholson. This book was released on 1977 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare s Beehive written by George Koppelman and published by Axletree Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of manuscript annotations in a curious copy of John Baret's ALVEARIE, an Elizabethan dictionary published in 1580. This revised and expanded second edition presents new evidence and furthers the argument that the annotations were written by William Shakespeare. This ebook contains text in color, and images. We recommend reading it on a device that displays both.
Download or read book Shakespeare s First Reader written by Jason Scott-Warren and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-09-20 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London. In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"—the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication. In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"—the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.
Download or read book Shakespeare s England written by Louis B. Wright and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When William Shakespeare was about twenty, his life changed forever. He left Stratford and walked to London, where he became the world's greatest playwright. Here is his little-told story of Shakespeare, presented against the colorful tapestry of his England, the kingdom under Elizabeth I and James I. In the reigns of those monarchs, the nation was emerging from centuries of medieval turmoil. The small island that had changed so little since the Norman Conquest of 1066 suddenly became a center of international adventure, political experimentation, and artistic development. Young Shakespeare was fortunate to be in England, and in London, when he was. The first professional theatre opened in the capital in 1576; he arrived, stage-struck and in search of a job, around 1587. He retired to Stratford as a wealthy gentleman in 1611, only a generation before the theatres of England were closed by the Puritans. During Shakespeare's London years, England seethed with plots and intrigue and throbbed with pageantry; everywhere a writer looked there was a scene to fire his imagination. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and other daring contemporaries, William Shakespeare was, indeed, an Elizabethan who took advantage of his time.
Download or read book The Elizabethan World Picture written by E. M. W. Tillkyard and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Purpose of Playing written by Louis Montrose and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the role of Elizabethan drama in the shape of cultural belief, values, and understanding of political authority.
Download or read book The Shakespearean Stage 1574 1642 written by Andrew Gurr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost forty years The Shakespearean Stage has been considered the liveliest, most reliable and most entertaining overview of Shakespearean theatre in its own time. It is the only authoritative book that describes all the main features of the original staging of Shakespearean drama in one volume: the acting companies and their practices, the playhouses, the staging and the audiences. Thoroughly revised and updated, this fourth edition contains fresh materials about how specific plays by Shakespeare were first staged, and provides new information about the companies that staged them and their playhouses. The book incorporates everything that has been discovered in recent years about the early modern stage, including the archaeology of the Rose and the Globe. Also included is an invaluable appendix, listing all the plays known to have been performed at particular playhouses and by specific companies.
Download or read book Shakespearean written by Robert McCrum and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Enchanting’ - Simon Russell Beale ‘Remarkable’ - James Shapiro ‘Wonderful . . . compulsively readable’ - Nicholas Hytner Why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday? When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke, described in My Year Off, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. Unable to travel or move as he used to, McCrum found the First Folio became his ‘book of life’, an endless source of inspiration through which he could embark on ‘journeys of the mind’, and see a reflection of our own disrupted times. An acclaimed writer and journalist, McCrum has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Shakespeare’s work, on stage and on the page. During this prolonged exploration, Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, so vivid and contemporary, have become his guide and consolation. In Shakespearean he asks: Why is it that we always return to Shakespeare, particularly in times of acute crisis and dislocation? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday? Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Through an enthralling narrative, ranging widely in time and space, McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within his historical context while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration, and examining the nature of creativity itself. Witty and insightful, he makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance – they are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity.
Download or read book Shakespearean Stage Production written by Cécile de Banke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing and original addition to Shakespeareana, this handbook of production is for all lovers of Shakespeare whether producer, player, scholar or spectator. In four sections, Staging, Actors and Acting, Costume, Music and Dance, it traces Shakespearean production from Elizabethan times to the 1950s when the book was originally published. This book suggests that Shakespeare should be performed today on the type of stage for which his plays were written. It analyses the development of the Elizabethan stage, from crude inn-yard performances to the building and use of the famous Globe. Since the Globe saw the enactment of some of the Bard’s greatest dramas, its construction, properties, stage devices, and sound effects are reviewed in detail with suggestions on how a producer can create the same effects on a modern or reconstructed Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare’s plays were written to fit particular groups of actors. The book gives descriptions of the men who formed the acting companies of Elizabethan London and of the actors of Shakespeare’s own company, giving insights into the training and acting that Shakespeare advocated. With full descriptions and pages of reproductions, the costume section shows the types of dress necessary for each play, along with accessories and trimmings. A table of Elizabethan fabrics and colours is included. The final section explores the little-known and interesting story of the integral part of music and dance in Shakespeare’s works. Scene by scene the section discusses appropriate music or song for each play and supplies substitute ideas for Elizabethan instruments. Various dances are described – among them the pavan, gailliard, canary and courante. This book is an invaluable wealth of research, with extensive bibliographies and extra information.
Download or read book William Shakespeare s Star Wars written by Ian Doescher and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Best Seller Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialogue by everyone from Darth Vader to R2D2. Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy. Zounds! This is the book you’re looking for.
Download or read book England in Shakespeare s Day written by George Bagshawe Harrison and published by London Methuen [1928]. This book was released on 1928 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage written by Peter Lake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of virtue -- Honour and its enemies: women on top - again -- Anti-popery -- Divided we fall: the politics of faction in time of war -- CHAPTER 6 Richard III: political ends, providential means -- The making of a Machiavel -- Monstrous bodies and providential signs -- Signs and prophecies -- The audience as 'high all- seer' -- Ambiguities of 'evil counsel' -- From providence to predestination: the return of legitimacy -- Richard III as a guide to the past, present and future -- CHAPTER 7 Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared
Download or read book How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain written by Ruth Goodman and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and popular BBC TV presenter Ruth Goodman, author of How to Be a Tudor, offers up a history of Renaissance Britain - the offensive language, insulting gestures, insolent behaviour, brawling and scandal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - with practical tips on just how to horrify the Tudor neighbours. From royalty to peasantry, every age has its bad eggs, those who break all the rules and rub everyone up the wrong way. But their niggling, anti-social and irritating ways not only tell us about what upset people, but also what mattered to them, how their society functioned and what kind of world they lived in. In this brilliantly nitty-gritty exploration of real life in the Tudor and Stuart age, you will discover: - how to choose the perfect insult, whether it be draggletail, varlet, flap, saucy fellow, strumpet, ninny-hammer or stinkard - why quoting Shakespeare was very poor form - the politics behind men kissing each other on the lips - why flashing the inside of your hat could repulse someone - the best way to mock accents, preachers, soldiers and pretty much everything else besides Ruth Goodman draws upon advice books and manuals, court cases and sermons, drama and imagery to outline bad behaviour from the gauche to the galling, the subtle to the outrageous. It is a celebration of drunkards, scolds, harridans and cross dressers in a time when calling a man a fool could get someone killed, and cursing wasn't just rude, it worked! 'Ruth is the queen of living history - long may she reign!' Lucy Worsley
