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Print Price: $31.50

Format:
Paperback
192 pp.
135 mm x 203 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199586479

Publication date:
July 2010

Imprint: OUP UK

Shakespeare and Biography

David Bevington

Series : Oxford Shakespeare Topics

General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject.

Shakespeare and Biography is not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, René Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sorts of issues these biographers have found especially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life. How has Shakespeare's contemplation of these issues changed and grown, and in what ways do those changes reflect new cultural developments in our world as it continues to reinterpret Shakespeare?

Readership : Suitable for scholars and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Shakespeare.

1. The Biographical Problem
2. The Art of Biography
3. Sex
4. Politics
5. Religion
6. Out of the Depths
7. On the Heights
8. L'envoi
Further Reading
Bibliography

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent books include The Seven Ages of Human Experience (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), co-authored with Anne Marie Welsh and Michael L. Greenwald, Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (Pearson Longman, 2006), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare's Plays in Production, Then and Now (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Shakespeare's Ideas (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, and of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is also senior editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama , 2002.

Shakespeare and Text - John Jowett
Shakespeare and Women - Phyllis Rackin
Shakespeare's Sonnets - Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin

Special Features

A lively account of Shakespearean biography by one of the world's foremost Shakespearean scholars.
Probes the challenges faced by biographers of Shakespeare across the ages.
Explains what is really known of the life of William Shakespeare - from the historical record and from his plays and poems.