Shakespeare Only

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare’s authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.

A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer 'It makes you impatient to see or re-read the plays at once' Hilary Mantel A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no others. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality and literary mastery. Who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn't really tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant, deflecting us from investigating the challenges of his inconsistencies and flaws. This electrifying new book thrives on revealing, not resolving, the ambiguities of Shakespeare's plays and their changing topicality. It introduces an intellectually, theatrically and ethically exciting writer who engages with intersectionality as much as with Ovid, with economics as much as poetry: who writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity and sex. It takes us into a world of politicking and copy-catting, as we watch him emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day; flirting with and skirting round the cut-throat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval and technological change. The Shakespeare in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean. This is Shakespeare. And he needs your attention.

This volume presents a winning selection of the very best essays from the long and distinguished career of Stanley Wells, one of the most well-known and respected Shakespeare scholars in the world. Wells's accomplishments include editing the entire canon of Shakespeare plays for the ground-breaking Oxford Shakespeare, and over his lifetime he has made significant contributions to debates over literary criticism of the works, genre study, textual theory, Shakespeare's afterlife in the theatre, and contemporary performance. The volume is introduced by Peter Holland, and its thirty chapters are divided into themed sections: 'Shakespearian Influences', 'Essays on Particular Works', 'Shakespeare in the Theatre', and 'Shakespeare's Text'. An afterword by Margreta de Grazia concludes the volume.

Virtuoso presentation of available evidence of the Bard's life. "Written with wit and panache, this erudite tome dismantles the arguments claiming that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays." — Publishers Weekly.

Taking seriously the commonplace that a man is known by the company he keeps—and particularly by the company he keeps over his lifetime—one can learn more about just about anyone by learning more about his friends. By applying this notion to Shakespeare, this book offers insight into the life of the most famous playwright in history, and one of the most elusive figures in literature. The book consists of sketches of Shakespeare's contact and relationships with the people known to have been close friends or acquaintances, revealing aspects of the poet's life by emphasizing ways in which his life was intertwined with theirs. Though it is difficult to get to know this most famous of playwrights, through this work readers can gain insight into aspects of his life and personality that may otherwise have been hidden. Shakespeare, more than any other writer in the western world, based much of his work on the consequences of friendship. Given the value placed on friends in his writing, many readers have wondered about the role friendship played in his own life. This work gives readers the chance to learn more about Shakespeare's friends, who they were and what they can tell us about Shakespeare and his times. For instance, Richard Field was a boyhood friend with whom Shakespeare went to school in Stratford. Field became a well-known London printer. The details of Field's life illuminate both the details of Shakespeare's boyhood education and the poet's relationship with the printing, publishing, and book-selling world in London. Francis Collins, a lawyer who represented Shakespeare in a number of legal dealings, drafted both versions of Shakespeare's will. This life-long friend was one of the last men eve to see Shakespeare pick up a pen to write. Through these vivid and animated sketches, readers will come to know about Shakespeare's life and times. While the book has a lively, accessible narrative tone within chapters, its organization and features make it highly useful to the school library market as well as the academic world. It contains cross references, a detailed Table of Contents and a highly organized structure with uniformity across sections and chapters. The writing is accessible and could be easily used by upper-level high school students looking to augment school assignments.

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.

Shakespeare's Books contains nearly 200 entries covering the full range of literature Shakespeare was acquainted with, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. The dictionary covers works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research, as well as explaining current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources include surveys of the writer's place in Shakespeare's time, detailed discussion of their relation to his work, and full bibliography. These are enhanced by sample passages from early modern England writers, together with reproductions of pages from the original texts. Now available in paperback with a new preface bringing the book up to date, this is an invaluable reference tool.