Shakespeare Histories

Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. In a writing career that spanned over twenty years during the explosion of poetic and theatrical creativity of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, William Shakespeare produced a body of work that has become the bedrock of human thought, literature and language in English. His poetry and plays have endured for almost 450 years, such is their universal appeal and understanding of the human condition.

Shakespeare’s plays and poems remain as beloved in the twenty-first century as they were in the sixteenth. For all the years between us, the world he inhabited was much like our own—afflicted by political turmoil, divisiveness, war, extreme weather, recurrent plagues, the fouling of natural resources on which everyone relied, and discrimination against people who were different. The bard’s remedy for these troubles was to offer respite and inspiration to his audience through his writing.

What was life like for Shakespeare's first audiences? In a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, how did Elizabethan play-goers make sense of their changing world? What did the plays mean to the public when they were first performed? In this fascinating series, Neil MacGregor attempts to answer these questions by examining 20 objects from that turbulent period. There are grand objects such as a communion chalice, a Venetian goblet, and Dr Dee's mirror, as well as everyday items.

The focus of the book is on Shakespeare's London, how it influenced his drama, and how he represents it on stage. Taking listeners on an imaginative journey through the city, the book moves both chronologically, from beginning to end of Shakespeare's dramatic career, and geographically, traversing London from west to east.

A full-cast, unabridged performance with comprehensive commentary and analysis for any student to fully understand and appreciate the play. Universally accepted as Shakespeare's finest play, we peel back the layers of Hamlet to discover how and why it deserves such a place of honour in world literature.

In Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richard’s own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeare’s soliloquies, into Samuel Johnson’s editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater.

One book above all others has transfixed connoisseurs for four centuries—a book sold for shillings in the streets of London, whisked to Manhattan for millions, and stored deep within the vaults of Tokyo. The book: William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623. Paul Collins, lover of odd books and author of the national bestseller Sixpence House, takes up the strange quest for this white whale of precious books.

Unique insights into Shakespeare, from one of the world’s most revered theatre directors. Who was the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Why does Shakespeare never go out of date? How should actors approach Shakespeare’s verse? In this short but immensely wise book, visionary theatre director Peter Brook debates the questions that are central to our understanding of Shakespeare, and revisits the plays he has directed with notable brilliance, including King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Renaissance, then pay attention.

These remarkable letters represent a wealth of as-yet-undiscovered knowledge about Shakespeare's relationships, personality, and career as he carved out his place in the chaotic world of 16th-century London. Whether you are a Shakespeare scholar, merely a fan, or even if you have never read any of his works, the stories of the The Lost Letters will enthrall you with their fascinating and true tale.

Welcome to the George Inn near London Bridge; a cosy, wood-panelled, galleried coaching house a few minutes' walk from the Thames. Consider this: who else has made this their local over the last 600 years? Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims almost certainly drank in the George on their way to Canterbury. Shakespeare may have popped in from the nearby Globe, and we know that Dickens definitely did. Mail carriers changed their horses here, while sailors drank here before sailing.

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 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents.

William Shakespeare is one of the most recognizable names in the world. Regardless of country, language, age, or gender, people are familiar with the Bard’s work and his contributions to literature, theater, art, and music. His genius was so evident that he became famous and respected throughout England in his own lifetime, eventually earning the attention and patronage of the king himself.

Do you want to learn more about William Shakespeare, but don’t have time to read/listen to huge, long biographies? Then let The History Journals take you on an hourly history tour of his life. Mention the name of William Shakespeare to students of English the whole world over, and you’ll run an entire gauntlet of reactions ranging from a glazed expression of complete indifference to abject misery and unmitigated terror.

In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized.

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience.

1601 am Globe Theatre in London uraufgeführt, gehört Shakespeares Drama Hamlet zu den bekanntesten und meistdiskutierten Tragödien der Weltliteratur. Bereits in der Entstehungszeit war das Stück populär und genießt bis heute eine beeindruckende Bühnenpräsenz; Aussprüche wie "Sein oder Nichtsein" haben Eingang gefunden in unsere Alltagssprache. Prinz Hamlet von Dänemark strebt danach, den Tod seines Vaters zu rächen. Um den Mörder zu finden, macht Hamlet eine Wahrheitsprobe in Form einer Inszenierung und führt ein Stück im Theaterstück auf.

Afterlives of Endor offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, Laura Levine examines such questions.