The riotous third novel in Charlie Owen's acclaimed seventies police series. Summer 1977: It’s no holiday in the sun in Handstead New Town, a north Manchester overspill. Known to the local cops as Horse’s Arse, it’s preparing to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. But with football violence, rampant police hooliganism and an expanding LSD market there’ll be a riot going on...
Winner of the 2019 Marfield Prize for Outstanding Writing About the Arts The remarkable, ridiculous, rain-soaked story of Shakespeare’s Jubilee: the event that established William Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time. In September 1769, three thousand people descended on Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the artistic legacy of the town’s most famous son, William Shakespeare. Attendees included the rich and powerful, the fashionable and the curious, eligible ladies and fortune hunters, and a horde of journalists and profiteers. For three days, they paraded through garlanded streets, listened to songs and oratorios, and enjoyed masked balls. It was a unique cultural moment—a coronation elevating Shakespeare to the throne of genius. Except it was a disaster. The poorly planned Jubilee imposed an army of Londoners on a backwater hamlet peopled by hostile and superstitious locals, unable and unwilling to meet their demands. Even nature refused to behave. Rain fell in sheets, flooding tents and dampening fireworks, and threatening to wash the whole town away. Told from the dual perspectives of David Garrick, who masterminded the Jubilee, and James Boswell, who attended it, What Blest Genius? is rich with humor, gossip, and theatrical intrigue. Recounting the absurd and chaotic glory of those three days in September, Andrew McConnell Stott illuminates the circumstances in which William Shakespeare became a transcendent global icon.
The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This major project offers an unprecedented scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Great Shakespeareans will be an essential resource for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies.
The second set of volumes in the eighteen-volume series Great Shakespeareans, covering the work of nineteen key figures who influenced the global understanding of Shakespeare
The greatest cultural mystery in the Western World is, "Who wrote the plays and sonnets published under the pen name of William Shakespeare?" For reasons of monarchial succession, greed and power, Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's chief counselor, forced Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to use a pseudonym for his great works. De Vere chose the pen name William Shakespeare. Because of his similar name, Cecil selected Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon as the fraudulent front man. Poor choice: Shakspere was uneducated, never owned a book, never traveled abroad, knew no foreign languages and could not read or write. Because of the tenacious grip of Conventional Wisdom, professors of English still believe Cecil's hoax 400 years later, clinging futilely to their Stratford Man despite abundant evidence against their illogical theory. Soul of the Age contains 28 high-quality articles by a remarkable new generation of authorship experts who clearly establish de Vere as Shakespeare and annihilate the illiterate Will Shakspere's candidacy. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Professor of History, Oxford University, 1962: "Armies of scholars, formidably equipped, have examined all the documents which could possibly contain at least a mention of his (Shakespeare's) name. One hundredth part of this labour applied to one of his insignificant contemporaries would be sufficient to produce a substantial biography. And yet the greatest of all Englishmen, after this tremendous inquisition, still remains so close a mystery that even his identity can still be doubted . . . "During his lifetime nobody claimed to know him. Not a single tribute was paid to him at his death. As far as the records go, he was uneducated, had no literary friends, possessed at his death no books, and could not write. It is true, six of his signatures have been found, all spelt differently; but they are so ill-formed that some graphologists suppose the hand to have been guided. Except for these signatures, no syllable of writing by Shakespeare [Shakspere] has been identified . . . Such is the best the historians can do. Clearly it is not enough. It may be the shell: it is not the man."
This book examines Shakespearean adaptations through the critical lens of fan studies and asks what it means to be a fan of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary media fandom. Although Shakespeare studies and fan studies have remained largely separate from one another for the past thirty years, this book establishes a sustained dialogue between the two fields. In the process, it reveals and seeks to overcome the problematic assumptions about the history of fan cultures, Shakespeare’s place in that history, and how fan works are defined. While fandom is normally perceived as a recent phenomenon focused primarily on science fiction and fantasy, this book traces fans’ practices back to the eighteenth century, particularly David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Shakespeare’s Fans connects historical and scholarly debates over who owns Shakespeare and what constitutes an appropriate adaptation of his work to online fan fiction and commercially available fan works.
This is the first book to explore Ben Jonson's place in the Romantic Age. It presents a varied, mobile, and contested Jonson and views the Romantic Age anew through a fresh lens. It will interest students of both the Renaissance and Romantic periods.
"A remarkable book that takes us to the heart of Shakespeare's art and influence."—James Shapiro When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. Unable to travel or move as he used to, the First Folio became his "book of life"—an endless source of inspiration through which he could embark on "journeys of the mind" and see a reflection of our own disrupted times. An acclaimed writer and journalist, McCrum has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Shakespeare's work, on stage and on the page. During this prolonged exploration, Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, so vivid and contemporary, have become his guide and consolation. In Shakespearean he asks: why is it that we always return to Shakespeare, particularly in times of acute crisis and dislocation? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday? Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Through an enthralling narrative, ranging widely in time and space, McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within his historical context while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration, and examining the nature of creativity itself. Witty and insightful, he makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance – they are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity.
