Download or read book The Quest for Shakespeare written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly regarded and best-selling literary writer and teacher, Joseph Pearce presents a stimulating and vivid biography of the world's most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard. Shakespeare is not only one of the greatest figures in human history, he is also one of the most controversial and one of the most elusive. He is famous and yet almost unknown. Who was he? What were his beliefs? Can we really understand his plays and his poetry if we don't know the man who wrote them? These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in this gripping and engaging study of the world's greatest ever poet. The Quest for Shakespeare claims that books about the Bard have got him totally wrong. They misread the man and misread the work. The true Shakespeare has eluded the grasp of the critics. Dealing with the facts of Shakespeare's life and times, Pearce's quest leads to the inescapable conclusion that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic living in very anti-Catholic times. Many of his friends and family were persecuted, and even executed, for their Catholic faith. And yet he seems to have avoided any notable persecution himself. How did he do this? How did he respond to the persecution of his friends and family? What did he say about the dreadful and intolerant times in which he found himself? The Quest for Shakespeare answers these questions in ways that will enlighten and astonish those who love Shakespeare's work, and that will shock and outrage many of his critics. This book is full of surprises for beginner and expert alike.
Download or read book Shakespeare on Love written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.
Download or read book In Shakespeare s Shadow written by Michael Blanding and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a self-taught sleuth's quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the world's most famous plays, taking readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives. What if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare . . . but someone else wrote him first? Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy and Elizabethan courtier Sir Thomas North. Unlike those who believe someone else secretly wrote Shakespeare, McCarthy argues that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before. In Shakespeare's Shadow alternates between the enigmatic life of North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theater, and academic outsider McCarthy's attempts to air his provocative ideas in the clubby world of Shakespearean scholarship. Through it all, Blanding employs his keen journalistic eye to craft a captivating drama, upending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his "singular genius." Winner of the 2021 International Book Award in Narrative Non-Fiction
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 178 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 Shakespeare the Papist written by Peter Milward and published by Sapientia Classics. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sapientia Classics Series Shakespeare, who wrote at the beginning of the long period in which the Catholic faith as violently suppressed in the British Isles, has long enjoyed an iconic status. Some readers have interpreted him as an early agnostic, expressing modern angst about whether anything exists besides "this mortal coil" that seems to be merely "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." In recent years, however, thanks largely to the work of Peter Milward, close study of Shakespeare's plays has raised the question: Was Shakespeare in fact a believing Catholic? To this question, which radically changes the way that Shakespeare's plays should be read, Milward here offers, in his definitive study of the topic, a resounding "Yes."
Download or read book Contested Will written by James Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.
Download or read book Shakespeare Undead written by Lori Handeland and published by Lori Handeland. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fun-filled fantasy romp through Elizabethan England . . . It has been said that one man could not possibly have created all the works attributed to William Shakespeare. However, what if Shakespeare was not a man? What if Shakespeare was an immortal vampire? What if the Dark Lady of his sonnets was a zombie hunter? What if they met, fell in love, thwarted evil together . . .
Download or read book Shakespeare s Lives written by Samuel Schoenbaum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a study of the changing images and differing ways that the life of English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been interpreted throughout history. The author takes readers on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, bringing the story right up to 1989. He reconstructs as much of the elusive author's life as possible, considering his family history, his economic standing, and his reputation with his peers; the Shakespeare who emerges may not always be the familiar one.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Resistance written by Clare Asquith and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's largely misunderstood narrative poems contain within them an explosive commentary on the political storms convulsing his country The 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents: two politically charged allegories of Tudor tyranny that justified-and even urged-direct action against an unpopular regime. The poems were Shakespeare's bestselling works in his lifetime, evidence that they spoke clearly to England's wounded populace and disaffected nobility, and especially to their champion, the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare and the Resistance unearths Shakespeare's own analysis of a political and religious crisis which would shortly erupt in armed rebellion on the streets of London. Using the latest historical research, it resurrects the story of a bold bid for freedom of conscience and an end to corruption that was erased from history by the men who suppressed it. This compelling reading situates Shakespeare at the heart of the resistance movement.
Download or read book The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare written by Doug Stewart and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the winter of 1795, a frustrated young writer named William Henry Ireland stood petrified in his father's study as two of England's most esteemed scholars interrogated him about a tattered piece of paper that he claimed to have found in an old trunk. It was a note from William Shakespeare. Or was it? In the months that followed, Ireland produced a torrent of Shakespearean fabrications: letters, poetry, drawings -- even an original full-length play that would be hailed as the Bard's lost masterpiece and staged at the Drury Lane Theatre. The documents were forensically implausible, but the people who inspected them ached to see first hand what had flowed from Shakespeare's quill. And so they did. This dramatic and improbable story of Shakespeare's teenaged double takes us to eighteenth century London and brings us face-to-face with history's most audacious forger.
Download or read book Who Wrote Shakespeare written by John Michell and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprinted from 1st pbk. ed., published in 1999. Originally published in hardcover in 1996.
Download or read book The Quest for Shakespeare s Globe written by John Orrell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the size, the shape and the architectural nature of the Globe playhouse of Shakespeare's time, the most important theatre in English history. The design of the second Globe, and by extension the first, has been a subject of keen debate for many years, fostered by recurrent attempts to reconstruct the playhouse, both in London and Detroit. Professor Orrell here offers fresh ways of looking at some well-known documents and newer evidence. By using detailed diagrams and seventeenth-century panoramas, the author is able to establish the accuracy of Hollar's famous 'Long View' of London, and by reconstructing his methods arrives at an exact measurement of the diameter of the second Globe. These findings document many advances in our hard knowledge of the theatre buildings of Shakespeare's time, to the point where reconstructions may be undertaken with confidence.
Download or read book Hamlet written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Joseph Pearce Contributors to this volume: Crystal Downing Anthony Esolen Gene Fendt Richard Harp Joseph Pearce Andrew Moran Jim Scott Orrick R.V. Young Arguably Shakespeare's finest and most important play, Hamlet is also one of the most misunderstood masterpieces of world literature. ""To be or not to be"", may be the question, but the answer has eluded many generations of critics. What does it mean ""to be""? And is everything as it seems to be? These are the questions that are asked and answered in the introduction by Joseph Pearce, author of The Quest for Shakespeare, and in the tradition-oriented critical essays by leading Shakespeare scholars that can be found in this groundbreaking edition of Shakespeare's masterpiece. To see or not to see, that is the question. The Ignatius Critical Edition of Hamlet will help many people truly see the play and its deepest meaning in a new and surprising light. The Ignatius Critical Editions represent a tradition-oriented alternative to popular textbook series such as the Norton Critical Editions or Oxford World Classics, and are designed to concentrate on traditional readings of the Classics of world literature. Whereas many modern critical editions have succumbed to the fads of modernism and post-modernism, this series will concentrate on tradition-oriented criticism of these great works. Edited by acclaimed literary biographer, Joseph Pearce, the Ignatius Critical Editions will ensure that traditional moral readings of the works are given prominence, instead of the feminist, or deconstructionist readings that often proliferate in other series of 'critical editions'. As such, they represent a genuine extension of consumer-choice, enabling educators, students and lovers of good literature to buy editions of classic literary works without having to 'buy into' the ideologies of secular fundamentalism. The series is particularly aimed at tradition-minded literature professors offering them an alternative for their students. The initial list will have about 15 - 20 titles. The goal is to release three books a season, or six in a year.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Body Politic written by Bernard J. Dobski and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: mate Shakespeare’s corpus, and one of the most prominent is the image of the body. Sketched out in the eternal lines of his plays and poetry, and often drawn in exquisite detail, variations on the body metaphor abound in the works of Shakespeare. Attention to the political dimensions of this metaphor in Shakespeare and the Body Politic permits readers to examine the sentiments of romantic love and family life, the enjoyment of peace, prosperity and justice, and the spirited pursuit of honor and glory as they inevitably emerge within the social, moral, and religious limits of particular political communities. The lessons to be learned from such an examination are both timely and timeless. For the tensions between the desires and pursuits of individuals and the health of the community forge the sinews of every body politic, regardless of the form it may take or even where and when one might encounter it. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare illuminates these tensions within the body politic, which itself constitutes the framework for a flourishing community of human beings and citizens—from the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the Christian cities and kingdoms of early modern Europe. The contributors to this volume attend to the political context and role of political actors within the diverse works of Shakespeare that they explore. Their arguments thus exhibit together Shakespeare’s political thought. By examining his plays and poetry with the seriousness they deserve, Shakespeare’s audiences and readers not only discover an education in human and political virtue, but also find themselves written into his lines. Shakespeare’s body of work is indeed politic, and the whole that it forms incorporates us all.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Library written by Stuart Kells and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The library’s fate has profound implications for literature, for national and cultural identity, and for the global Shakespeare industry. It bears upon 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. Stuart Kells is an author and book-trade historian. His 2015 book Penguin and the Lane Brothers won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. An authority on rare books, he has written and published on many aspects of print culture and the book world. Stuart lives in Melbourne with his family. 'Stuart Kells presents a fascinating and persuasive new paradigm that challenges our preconceptions about the Bard’s literary talent.’ Age ‘A delight to read, a wonderful piece of erudition and dazzling detective work.’ David Astle, Evenings on ABC Radio Melbourne ‘An excellent and incredibly fascinating read.’ 3RRR Backstory 'A fascinating examination of a persistent literary mystery.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Kells’s reflections are wonderfully romantic, wryly funny...There’s no doubt we can all learn a lot from the magnificently obsessive and eloquent Kells.’ Australian on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders ‘Kells is a magnificent guide to the abundant treasures he sets out.’ Mathilda Imlah, Australian Book Review on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders ‘If you think you know what a library is, this marvellously idiosyncratic book will make you think again. After visiting hundreds of libraries around the world and in the realm of the imagination, bibliophile and rare-book collector Stuart Kells has compiled an enchanting compendium of well-told tales and musings both on the physical and metaphysical dimensions of these multi-storied places.’ Age on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders
Download or read book Shakespeare Thinking written by Philip Davis and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-05-17 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespearean thinking is always dynamic: thinking that happens in the living moment of its performance, in quickly passing process. This book offers a model of human mentality that can be shown through the dense immediacy of dramatic thinking, as embodied above all in Shakespeare's working method. Shakespeare Thinking discusses the positioning of Shakespeare as the paradigm of fully human mental creativity from the Romantics to the latest neurological experiments which show that Shakespeare can reveal new understandings of the hard-wiring of the human brain, and the sheer sudden electricity of its synaptic development.
Download or read book The Science of Shakespeare written by Dan Falk and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time—a period we now recognize as the first phase of the Scientific Revolution. New ideas were transforming Western thought, the medieval was giving way to the modern, and the work of a few key figures hinted at the brave new world to come: the methodical and rational Galileo, the skeptical Montaigne, and—as Falk convincingly argues—Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky. In The Science of Shakespeare, we meet a colorful cast of Renaissance thinkers, including Thomas Digges, who published the first English account of the "new astronomy" and lived in the same neighborhood as Shakespeare; Thomas Harriot—"England's Galileo"—who aimed a telescope at the night sky months ahead of his Italian counterpart; and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observatory-castle stood within sight of Elsinore, chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet—and whose family crest happened to include the names "Rosencrans" and "Guildensteren." And then there's Galileo himself: As Falk shows, his telescopic observations may have influenced one of Shakespeare's final works. Dan Falk's The Science of Shakespeare explores the connections between the famous playwright and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution—and how, together, they changed the world forever.
