Shakespeare S Friends

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 particular, we see the full variety of erotic connections, from the "star-crossed" devotions of Romeo and Juliet to the failed romance of Troilus and Cressida to the problematic friendship of Falstaff and Hal.".

Intended for all readers, an exciting, innovative approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets."His sugared Sonnets among his private friends." That's how Shakespeare's Sonnets were described in the only contemporary reference to them. This brings up the image of a talented, young poet-with a penchant for irreverent fun-getting together with friends to read his new sonnet cycle. Numerous sonnet cycles were published that typically told the story of thwarted love. The same topics are repeated: a chaste and beautiful lady, a love-sick poet dreaming only of his beloved, sunk into despair by her cruelty (cruel only because she decides to remain chaste). Shakespeare's Sonnets are like this, but with a twist-adding a love triangle that turning convention upside down. Working out all the possibilities of this intriguing story as the sonnets progress is all part of the fun.Atkins invites you to imagine that you are among the friends our poet has allowed to see his new sonnets. You'll read the poems and the discussion of each one, trying to figure out the story. See what it might have been like to read Shakespeare's Sonnets "among his private friends."This book, complete with glosses of difficult words and phrases and a thorough explanation of each poem, is as carefully edited as the acclaimed variorum edition published by Atkins in 2007, Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. It has the same sensitive readings of verse that made his variorum edition unique. (For those particularly interested in Shakespeare's use of meter, Atkins has made a complete metrical analysis of all 154 poems, which serves as an excellent companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets Among His Private Friends. It is available free at amonghisprivatefriends.com.) Also unique to this edition is a look at how the last 28 sonnets about a "dark lady" may have been influenced by Christopher Marlowe's English translation of Ovid's erotic poems, Amores (Book 1 of which is included in an appendix).294 pages including appendix, bibliography and index

Shakespeare's Book of Wisdom offers practical and profound advice for readers ages 15 to 115 from the writings of Shakespeare as well as from dozens of other philosophers, artists, saints, and sinners throughout history. Every entry consists of a practical piece of advice, illustrated by a quote from Shakespeare and a plain-English translation.

Jim Gillespie and his wife Judy are the parents of six grown children. He has been a resident of Park Ridge, Illinois for the past 65 years. Jim’s hobbies consist of family vacations, playing jazz music, and of course creative writing. For seventeen years Jim has published a Family Anthology consisting of family vignettes, poems, short stories, thought pieces and family works. Jim currently is the President of the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation, an organization that supports youth in the arts and civics.

Renaissance Humanism developed a fantasy of friendship in which men can be absolutely equal to one another, but Shakespeare and other dramatists quickly saw through this rhetoric and developed their own ideas about friendship more firmly based on a respect for human difference. They created a series of brilliant and varied fictions for human connection, as often antagonistic as sympathetic, using these as a means for individuals to assert themselves in the face of social domination. Whilst the fantasy of equal and permanent friendship shaped their thinking, dramatists used friendship most effectively as a way of shaping individuality and its limitations. Dealing with a wide range of Shakespeare's plays and poems, and with many works of his contemporaries, this study gives readers a deeper insight into a crucial aspect of Shakespeare's culture and his use of it in art.

This book solves a 400 year old mystery about Shakespeare's friends. The contents are based on a theory which fits in exactly with all the words in the sonnets and with historically recorded facts. There is no firm evidence, but this theory reveals a fascinating and tragic story about Shakespeare's associates which will be very difficult to discredit. It illustrates the theological emphasis in Hamlet and the influences from the Church that Shakespeare encountered. It encompasses the tangled web of deceit between Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius and Gertrude and how this story reflected the events in Shakespeare's own life.