Mapping Shakespeare's World

Mapping Shakespeare's World
Author: Peter Whitfield
Publisher: Bodleian Library
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Cartography
ISBN: 9781851242573

The locations of Shakespeare s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he and his contemporaries know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love s Labour s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical background of the plays could be. "

Shakespeare's Restless World

Shakespeare's Restless World
Author: Neil MacGregor
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101638117

The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 100 Objects brings the world of Shakespeare and the Tudor era of Elizabeth I into focus We feel we know Shakespeare’s characters. Think of Hamlet, trapped in indecision, or Macbeth’s merciless and ultimately self-destructive ambition, or the Machiavellian rise and short reign of Richard III. They are so vital, so alive and real that we can see aspects of ourselves in them. But their world was at once familiar and nothing like our own. In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, working together in a landmark collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, bring us twenty objects that capture the essence of Shakespeare’s universe. A perfect complement to A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor’s landmark New York Times bestseller, Shakespeare’s Restless World highlights a turning point in human history. This magnificent book, illustrated throughout with more than one hundred vibrant color photographs, invites you to travel back in history and to touch, smell, and feel what life was like at that pivotal moment, when humankind leaped into the modern age. This was an exhilarating time when discoveries in science and technology altered the parameters of the known world. Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation map allows us to imagine the age of exploration from the point of view of one of its most ambitious navigators. A bishop’s cup captures the most sacred and divisive act in Christendom. With A History of the World in 100 Objects, MacGregor pioneered a new way of telling history through artifacts. Now he trains his eye closer to home, on a subject that has mesmerized him since childhood, and lets us see Shakespeare and his world in a whole new light.

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare
Author: Bruce R. Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN: 9781107057258

This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

Mapping Shakespeare

Mapping Shakespeare
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1844865150

William Shakespeare's lifetime (1564–1616) spanned the reigns of the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I and the first of the Stuart kings, James I and the changing times and political mores of the time were reflected through his plays. This beautiful new book looks at the England in which Shakespeare worked through maps and illustrations that reveal the way that he and his contemporaries saw their land and their place in the world. It also explores the locations of his plays and looks at the possible inspirations for these and why Shakespeare would have chosen to set his stories there.

Sonnet's Shakespeare

Sonnet's Shakespeare
Author: Sonnet L'Abbe
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0771073100

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393079848

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

The Book of William

The Book of William
Author: Paul Collins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-07-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1596911956

A history of the Bard's competitively pursued First Folio traces the author's travels from the site of a Sotheby auction to regions in Asia, throughout which he investigated the roles played by those who have sought and owned the Folios.

Shakespeare's First Folio

Shakespeare's First Folio
Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2016-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191069280

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations to wineglass rings, First Folios teem with evidence of its place in different contexts with different priorities. This study offers new ways to understand Shakespeare's reception and the history of the book. Unlike previous scholarly investigations of the First Folio, it is not concerned with the discussions of how the book came into being, the provenance of its texts, or the technicalities of its production. Instead, it reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world - their bindings, marginalia, general condition, sales history, and location - to discuss five major themes: owning, reading, decoding, performing, and perfecting. This is a history of the book that consolidated Shakespeare's posthumous reputation: a reception history and a study of interactions between owners, readers, forgers, collectors, actors, scholars, booksellers, and the book through which we understand and recognise Shakespeare.

Worlds Elsewhere

Worlds Elsewhere
Author: Andrew Dickson
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1448155096

Anti-apartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the Wild West: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before. ‘Extraordinarily exhilarating ... like no other Shakespeare criticism you have ever read’ (Margaret Drabble) ~ ‘A tour de force by any standards’ (David Crystal) ~ ‘Revelatory’ (James Shapiro) ~ ‘Brilliantly original’ (Michael Pye) From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at the most fascinating of times and in the most unexpected of places. But what is it about William Shakespeare – a man who never once set foot outside England – that has made him at home in so many places around the globe? Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an attempt to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is – and why.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare
Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780714128245

The playhouse and the role of playwright were relatively new phenomena during Shakespeares time, yet his audience spanned from royalty to the common man. This text shows what these audiences were finding out about the world through the eyes of the playwright Dora Thornton.