The Shakespeare Enigma

The Shakespeare Enigma

Author: Peter Dawkins

Publisher: Polair Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0954538943

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Simply asking, 'Who was Shakespeare?', this book comes up with surprising conclusions. It offers a trail that leads to a very different person from the Stratford actor. It contains insights into the plays and poems, and into the English Renaissance that followed the final break with Rome.


A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets

A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets

Author: Michael Schoenfeldt

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-03-08

Total Pages: 535

ISBN-13: 1444332066

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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.


Shaw on Shakespeare

Shaw on Shakespeare

Author: Bernard Shaw

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9781557835611

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(Applause Books). "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his." - From SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE Celebrated playwright, critic and essayist George Bernard Shaw was more like the Elizabethan master that he would ever admit. Both men were intristic dramatists who shared a rich and abiding respect for the stage. Shakespeare was the produce of a tempestuous and enlightening era under the reign of his patron, Queen Elizabeth I; while G.B.S. reflected the racy and risque spirt of the late 19th century as the champion of modern drama by playwrights like Ibsen, and, later, himself. Culled from Shaw's reviews, prefaces, letters to actors and critics, and other writings, SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE offers a fascinating and unforgettable portrait of the 16th century playwright by his most outspoken critic. This is a witty and provocative classic that combines Shaw's prodigious critical acumen with a superlative prose style second to none (except, perhaps, Shakespeare!).


Sweet Swan of Avon

Sweet Swan of Avon

Author: Robin Williams

Publisher: Peachpit Press

Published: 2006-03-15

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 0132797771

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It is long overdue that someone took a closer look at the brilliant Mary Sidney. I have a suspicion that Mary Sidney’s life, and especially her dedication to the English language after her brother’s death, may throw important light on the mysterious authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems. —Mark Rylance Actor; Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, 1996–2006; Chairman of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust For more than two hundred years, a growing number of researchers have questioned whether the man named William Shakespeare actually wrote the works attributed to him. There is no paper trail for William Shakespeare—no record that he was ever paid for writing, nothing in his handwriting but a few signatures on legal documents, no evidence of his presence in the royal court except as an actor in his later years, no confirmation of his involvement in the literary circles of the time. With so little information about this man—and even less evidence connecting him to the plays and sonnets—what can and what can’t we assume about the author of the greatest works of the English language? For the first time, Robin P. Williams presents an in-depth inquiry into the possibility that Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote the works attributed to the man named William Shakespeare. As well educated as Queen Elizabeth I, this woman was at the forefront of the literary movement in England, yet not allowed to write for the public stage. But that’s just the beginning . . . The first question I am asked by curious freshmen in my Shakespeare course is always, “Who wrote these plays anyway?” Now, because of Robin Williams’ rigorous scholarship and artful sleuthing, Mary Sidney Herbert will forever have to be mentioned as a possible author of the Shakespeare canon. Sweet Swan of Avon doesn’t pretend to put the matter to rest, but simply shows how completely reasonable the authorship controversy is, and how the idea of a female playwright surprisingly answers more Shakespearean conundrums than it creates... —Cynthia Lee Katona Professor of Shakespeare and Women’s Studies, Ohlone College; Author of Book Savvy


Shakespeare's Window Into the Soul

Shakespeare's Window Into the Soul

Author: Martin Lings

Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

Published: 2006-06-27

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9781594771200

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Shakespeare's plays, argues Lings, concern far more than the workings of the human psyche; they are sacred, visionary works that, through the use of esoteric symbol and form, mirror the passage the soul must make to reach its final sacred union with the divine.


On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare's The Tempest

On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare's The Tempest

Author: Roger A. Stritmatter

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-08-24

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1476603707

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This book challenges a longstanding and deeply ingrained belief in Shakespearean studies that The Tempest--long supposed to be Shakespeare's last play--was not written until 1611. In the course of investigating this proposition, which has not received the critical inquiry it deserves, a number of subsidiary and closely related interpretative puzzles come sharply into focus. These include the play's sources of New World imagery; its festival symbolism and structure; its relationship to William Strachey's True Reportory account of the 1609 Bermuda wreck of the Sea Venture (not published until 1625)--and the tangled history of how and why scholars have for so long misunderstood these matters. Publication of some preliminary elements of the authors' arguments in leading Shakespearean journals (starting in 2007) ignited a controversy that became part of the critical history. This book presents the case in full for the first time.


Shakespeare and Greece

Shakespeare and Greece

Author: Alison Findlay

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1474244262

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This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focusing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire.