Synopses & Reviews
A brilliant piece of historical investigative journalism, Shakespeare is a fresh telling of the playwright's life based on a wide range of newly discovered sources, such as police and torture records. Rather than approaching Shakespeare as an isolated genius, Wood argues that he was very much a product of his place and time--a period of upheaval that straddled the medieval and modern worlds. It was a time of great tensions, marked by murderous plots and purges of the Elizabethan police state, from the Somerville Plot and the Essex rebellion to the Gunpowder Plot, which can now be shown to have touched Shakespeare and his family directly. If we wonder why Shakespeare was so obsessed with violence, and especially the violence of the state, there is an answer: This was Shakespeare's world.Furthermore, Wood reveals new and surprising evidence about: Shakespeare's Catholic faith, his work, and his attitudes on sex and on race. In doing so he reinstates the image of Shakespeare as a thinking artist, his work based firmly in the religion, politics, culture and class antagonisms of his day. Shakespeare plunges us headlong into the turbulent life and times of William Shakespeare. Presented in a beautifully designed package, with over 100 four-color and black-and-white illustrations, the result is a more convincing and complete portrait of the artist than was previously thought possible.
Review
"[Michael Wood] does up the life of the Bard with gusto....[A] titillating text not quite within the bounds of formal scholarship. Yet Wood, trained as a medievalist, has done plenty of homework." Kirkus Reviews
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"[T]his life of Shakespeare has all the vividness of a good television profile, backed up with a keen and contentious historical perspective on his turbulent era....Wood brings 16th-century London to raucous life..." Publishers Weekly
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"[E]xciting...tendentious....[Wood's] account of the London of Shakespeare's day is excellently done and interestingly illustrated, sometimes with 19th-century photographs of Jacobean streets and buildings long since destroyed." The New York Times Book Review
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"I find much to admire in [Wood's] accounts of Stratford and Warwickshire in the 16th century. They are rich in detail and description, and he is skillful in picking up entertaining tidbits to add color to the scene." The Washington Post Book World
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"A nicely illustrated biography." The Orlando Sentinel
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"In this enthralling book Michael Wood evokes the physical and intellectual environment in which Shakespeare lived and worked with vivid and original immediacy." Professor Stanley Wells, editor of The Oxford Shakespeare
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"[A] forceful portrait of Shakespeare and his world....While much of the material is based on the research of other scholars, Wood's work includes enough new detail to merit consideration for purchase." Library Journal
Synopsis
Drawing on an extensive range of sources, Michael Wood takes us back into Elizabethan England to reveal a man who was very much a product of his time. Marked by murderous plots and state terror, religious divisions and rebellious movements, the Spanish Armada and the colonization of the Americas, Shakespeare's dramatic world is here conjured like never before. Using a wealth of unexplored archive evidence including nineteenth-century photographs of Tudor buildings that survived London's Great Fire the author dramatically conjures up the neighborhoods where Shakespeare lived and worked during his glittering career. We enter the lodgings where he wrote his greatest plays, and meet the real-life characters who inspired him: doctors, landladies, musicians, foreigners and members of London's black population. We learn of his family's Catholic roots, light is shed on his father's changing fortunes, and new evidence for the dating of the sonnets reveals anguished reactions to the death of his only son.
Stocked with fresh insights and discoveries, this compelling work of investigative journalism reinstates the image of William Shakespeare as a thinking artist, a man who held up a mirror to his age, but who was also, as his friend Ben Jonson said, "not of an age, but for all time."
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 345-347) and index.
Synopsis
The greatest writer of the English language as he lived and breathed--a compelling portrait of William Shakespeare and his world, vividly rendered by author and television presenter Michael Wood
Table of Contents
Prologue 7
1 Roots 14
2 A Child of State 31
3 Education: School and Beyond 47
4 John Shakespeare's Secret 65
5 Marriage and Children 81
6 The Lost Years 97
7 London: Fame 110
8 The Duty of Poets 145
9 'A Hell of Time' 165
10 Shakespeare in Love? 186
11 Shakespeare's Dream of England 207
12 Ambition: The Globe 219
13 The Theatre of the World 242
14 Gunpowder, Treason and Plot 283
15 Lost Worlds, New Worlds 299
16 Tempests Are Kind 321
Epilogue 343
Further Reading 345
Acknowledgements 347
Index 349