Download or read book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare written by James Shapiro and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book 1606 written by James Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An intimate portrait of one of Shakespeare's most inspired moments: the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. 1606, while a very good year for Shakespeare, is a fraught one for England. Plague returns. There is surprising resistance to the new king's desire to turn England and Scotland into a united Britain. And fear and uncertainty sweep the land and expose deep divisions in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack that came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot. James Shapiro deftly demonstrates how these extraordinary plays responded to the tumultuous events of this year, events that in unexpected ways touched upon Shakespeare's own life ... [and] profoundly changes and enriches our experience of his plays--Publisher's description.
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 in a Divided America written by James Shapiro and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.
Download or read book The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life written by Dani Jansen and published by Second Story Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alison Green, desperate Valedictorian-wannabe, agrees to produce her school’s disaster-prone production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her second big mistake is accidentally saying yes to a date with her oldest friend, Jack, even though she’s crushing on Charlotte, the star of the play.
Download or read book Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year written by and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year is not just for Christmas, but for all time." —Helena Bonham Carter A magnificent collection of 365 passages from Shakespeare's works, for the Shakespeare scholar and neophyte alike. Make Shakespeare a part of your daily routine with Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year, a yearlong collection of passages from Shakespeare's greatest works. Drawing from the full spectrum of plays and sonnets to mark each day of the year, whether it's a scene from Hamlet to celebrate Christmas or a Sonnet in June to help you enjoy a summer's day. There are also passages to mark important days in the Shakespeare calendar, both from his own life and from his plays: You'll read a pivotal speech from Julius Caesar on the Ides of March and celebrate Valentine's day with a sonnet. Every passage is accompanied by an enlightening note to teach you its significance and help you better appreciate the timelessness and poetry of Shakespeare's words. Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year will give you a thoughtful way reflect on each day, all while giving you a deeper appreciation for the most famous writer in the English language.
Download or read book Soul of the Age written by Jonathan Bate and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book William Shakespeare written by Ari Berk and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes Shakespeare's experiences in London and his retirement to the country in a fictional account that includes excerpts from his works.
Download or read book Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Anniversary Edition written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Book of William written by Paul Collins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-07-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Jews written by James Shapiro and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1996, James Shapiro's pathbreaking analysis of the portrayal of Jews in Elizabethan England challenged readers to recognize the significance of Jewish questions in Shakespeare's day. From accounts of Christians masquerading as Jews to fantasies of settling foreign Jews in Ireland, Shapiro's work delves deeply into the cultural insecurities of Elizabethans while illuminating Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In a new preface, Shapiro reflects upon what he has learned about intolerance since the first publication of Shakespeare and the Jews.
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 The Complete Works of William Shakespeare written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book King Lear written by Jeffrey Kahan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-04-18 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink
Download or read book The Life of William Shakespeare written by Lois Potter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works
Download or read book Shakespeare written by Mark Van Doren and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2005-08-31 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.
Download or read book Oberammergau written by James Shapiro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-06-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bavarian village of Oberammergau has staged the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ nearly every decade since 1634. Each production of the Passion Play attracts hundreds of thousands, many drawn by the spiritual benefits it promises. Yet Hitler called it a convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry, and in 1970 a group of international luminaries boycotted the play for its anti-Semitism. As the production for the year 2000 drew near, James Shapiro was there to document the newest wave of obstacles that faced the determined Bavarian villagers. Erudite and judicious, Oberammergau is a fascinating and important look at the unpredictable and sometimes tragic relationship between art and society, belief and tolerance, religion and politics.
