The Reader's Companion to The Death of Shakespeare


Book Description

The historical record for William Shakespeare being bare, The Death of Shakespeare imagines how the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, with occasional help from Shakespeare. The Reader's Companion to The Death of Shakespeare contains notes made while writing the novel that was distilled into The Reader’s Companion to help separate fact from fiction.




The Death of Shakespeare - Part One


Book Description

William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon appeared in London in 1590 at the age of 26 and is believed by many to have begun writing the greatest plays the world has ever seen. There is no record of his education, if he had any. His parents, wife and children may have been illiterate. He left no books. No one reported in any diary or letter that they had met him or talked to him, or even talked about him. He left six signatures, all different. Three were on his last will and testament, which makes no mention of any plays, poems or books; two were on deeds to real property; the last was on an affidavit he gave in a court case. The records show a businessman who acquired considerable property during his lifetime, hoarded grain during a famine, and engaged in a number of lawsuits, one over as little as five pounds. He was connected with the theatre and may have been an actor, but there is nothing that independently proves he was the author of the plays attributed to him. Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Sir Derek Jacobi, Walt Whitman, and many others, including a number of United States Supreme Court justices, have all concluded that William did not write the plays. But if he didn’t, who did? And if someone else was the greatest author who ever lived, why was Shakespeare given the credit? This is how it happened, and why Shakespeare paid with his life for his part in, to use the words of Henry James, “the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."




The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion


Book Description

A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.




The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare


Book Description

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is the most comprehensive reference work available on Shakespeare's life, times, works, and his 400-year global legacy. In addition to the authoritative A-Z entries, it includes nearly 100 illustrations, a chronology, a guide to further reading, a thematic contents list, and special feature entries on each of Shakespeare's works. Tying in with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this much-loved Companion has been revised and updated, reflecting developments and discoveries made in recent years and to cover the performance, interpretation, and the influence of Shakespeare's works up to the present day. First published in 2001, the online edition was revised in 2011, with updates to over 200 entries plus 16 new entries. These online updates appear in print for the first time in this second edition, along with a further 35,000 new and revised words. These include more than 80 new entries, ranging from important performers, directors, and scholars (such as Lucy Bailey, Samuel West, and Alfredo Michel Modenessi), to topics as diverse as Shakespeare in the digital age and the ubiquity of plants in Shakespeare's works, to the interpretation of Shakespeare globally, from Finland to Iraq. To make information on Shakespeare's major works easier to find, the feature entries have been grouped and placed in a centre section (fully cross-referenced from the A-Z). The thematic listing of entries - described in the press as 'an invaluable panorama of the contents' - has been updated to include all of the new entries. This edition contains a preface written by much-lauded Shakespearian actor Simon Russell Beale. Full of both entertaining trivia and scholarly detail, this authoritative Companion will delight the browser and reward students, academics, as well as anyone wanting to know more about Shakespeare.




The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Shakespeare


Book Description

In the same winning formula as The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie (more than 300,000 copies sold) and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes (1999), this all-new companion to Shakespeare will present The Bard in a new and exciting way in a new century. For students, scholars, theater lovers, and scholars - nearly everyone! - this book wraps some 400 years of Bardology into a lively and often unexpected package.In their witty and inimitable way, Dick Riley and Pam McAllister examine the whole dramatic canon, play by play, including dramas of disputed authorship. (The long poems and sonnets are also covered.) Included are inside stories on theater and film productions, "alternate" interpretations of the plays, Shakespeare's status around the world, the clubs and societies, the mysterious life - and even the question that has plagued critics almost from the day he put down his quill: whether Shakespeare even wrote the works attributed to him.




The Reader's Companion to World Literature


Book Description

An alphabetical listing and description of authors, works, literary types and terms, mythological figures, and literary periods and movements from all over the world.




Shakesqueer


Book Description

Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies. Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates




The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture


Book Description

This book offers a collection of essays on Shakespeare's life and works in popular forms and media.




A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets


Book Description

This Companion represents the myriad ways of thinking about the remarkable achievement of Shakespeare’s sonnets. An authoritative reference guide and extended introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Contains more than 20 newly-commissioned essays by both established and younger scholars. Considers the form, sequence, content, literary context, editing and printing of the sonnets. Shows how the sonnets provide a mirror in which cultures can read their own critical biases. Informed by the latest theoretical, cultural and archival work.




The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy


Book Description

This updated Companion has been fully revised and includes an extensively overhauled bibliography and four new chapters by leading scholars.