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Voices of Shakespeare's England offers students and public library patrons over 50 primary documents that illuminate the character, personalities, and events of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Voices of Shakespeare's England: Contemporary Accounts of Elizabethan Daily Life helps readers explore the era that produced, among other things, the world's greatest playwright. It brings together excerpts from over 50 primary documents written in William Shakespeare's lifetime, including letters, literature, speeches and polemics, official reports, and descriptive narratives. Voices of Shakespeare's England includes the works of Shakespeare himself, as well as other poets and playwrights, but it also expands beyond the literary world to cover politics, religion, economics, social change, and the royal court. By allowing Shakespeare's contemporaries to speak in their own voices, it offers an illuminating look at the breadth of Elizabethan society, including major historic events in England as well as Scotland, Ireland, the European continent, and even the new world of America.
This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.
Actor, producer and director Ben Crystal revisits his acclaimed book on Shakespeare for the 400th anniversary of his death, updating and adding three new chapters. Shakespeare on Toast knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of the Bard, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling, uplifting drama. The bright words and colourful characters of the greatest hack writer are brought brilliantly to life, sweeping cobwebs from the Bard – his language, his life, his world, his sounds, his craft. Crystal reveals man and work as relevant, accessible and alive – and, astonishingly, finds Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry. Whether you're studying Shakespeare for the first time or you've never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to, this book smashes down the walls that have been built up around this untouchable literary figure. Told in five fascinating Acts, this is quick, easy and good for you. Just like beans on toast.
Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London. In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"—the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication. In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"—the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.
Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world’s most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare’s library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the bard’s manuscripts, books or letters has ever been found. The search for Shakespeare’s library is much more than a treasure hunt. The library’s fate has profound implications for literature, for national and cultural identity, and for the global Shakespeare industry. It bears upon fundamental principles of art, identity, history, meaning and truth. Unfolding the search like the mystery story that it is, acclaimed author Stuart Kells follows the trail of the hunters, taking us through different conceptions of the library and of the man himself. Entertaining and enlightening, Shakespeare’s Library is a captivating exploration of one of literature’s most enduring enigmas. Stuart Kells is an author and book-trade historian. His 2015 book Penguin and the Lane Brothers won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. An authority on rare books, he has written and published on many aspects of print culture and the book world. Stuart lives in Melbourne with his family. 'Stuart Kells presents a fascinating and persuasive new paradigm that challenges our preconceptions about the Bard’s literary talent.’ Age ‘A delight to read, a wonderful piece of erudition and dazzling detective work.’ David Astle, Evenings on ABC Radio Melbourne ‘An excellent and incredibly fascinating read.’ 3RRR Backstory 'A fascinating examination of a persistent literary mystery.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Kells’s reflections are wonderfully romantic, wryly funny...There’s no doubt we can all learn a lot from the magnificently obsessive and eloquent Kells.’ Australian on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders ‘Kells is a magnificent guide to the abundant treasures he sets out.’ Mathilda Imlah, Australian Book Review on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders ‘If you think you know what a library is, this marvellously idiosyncratic book will make you think again. After visiting hundreds of libraries around the world and in the realm of the imagination, bibliophile and rare-book collector Stuart Kells has compiled an enchanting compendium of well-told tales and musings both on the physical and metaphysical dimensions of these multi-storied places.’ Age on The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders
Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.
When William Shakespeare was about twenty, his life changed forever. He left Stratford and walked to London, where he became the world's greatest playwright. Here is his little-told story of Shakespeare, presented against the colorful tapestry of his England, the kingdom under Elizabeth I and James I. In the reigns of those monarchs, the nation was emerging from centuries of medieval turmoil. The small island that had changed so little since the Norman Conquest of 1066 suddenly became a center of international adventure, political experimentation, and artistic development. Young Shakespeare was fortunate to be in England, and in London, when he was. The first professional theatre opened in the capital in 1576; he arrived, stage-struck and in search of a job, around 1587. He retired to Stratford as a wealthy gentleman in 1611, only a generation before the theatres of England were closed by the Puritans. During Shakespeare's London years, England seethed with plots and intrigue and throbbed with pageantry; everywhere a writer looked there was a scene to fire his imagination. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and other daring contemporaries, William Shakespeare was, indeed, an Elizabethan who took advantage of his time.
Illyria in Shakespeare’s England studies the eastern Adriatic region known as “Illyria” in five plays by Shakespeare and other early modern English writing. It examines the origins and features of past discourses on the area, expanding our knowledge of the ways in which England and other polities negotiated their position in the early modern world.