Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, and the Other Players in His Story. - Hardcover

Wells, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713997737 ISBN 13: 9780713997736

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2006

Synopsis

Summary: From one of our most distinguished Shakespeare scholars. here is a fascinating. lively. anecdotal work of forensic biography that firmly places Shakespeare within the hectic. exhilarating world in which he lived and wrote. Theater in Shakespeare's day was a burgeoning “growth industry. Everyone knew everyone else. and they all sought to learn. borrow or steal from one another. As Stanley Wells suggests: To see Shakespeare as one among a great company is only to enhance our sense of what made him unique. ”Wells explores Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. both behind the scenes and in front of the curtain. He examines how the great actors of the time influenced Shakespeare's work. He writes about the lives and works of the other major writers of Shakespeare's day and discusses Shakespeare's relationships-sometimes collaborative-with each of them.

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Wells has devoted most of life to teaching, editing and writing about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Honorary Governor Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, he is also Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies of the University of Birmingham. He is General Editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare and co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. His recent account of Shakespeare and his after-life, Shakespeare For All Time, was described as the best book about Shakespeare for a generation.

Review

Praise from Great Britain:

“Fascinating... An enthralling work of popular scholarship.”
–Robert McCrum, The Observer

“Ingenious... [Shakespeare’s London] was a time and a place teeming with excitement, anecdote and incident, and Wells, in this richly enjoyable work, brings it to life with a novelist’s sense of the telling detail.”
–Dominic Dromgoole, The Sunday Times

“Comprehensive and colorful... This is illuminating, well-planned and suggestive work, not only for those readers who have little acquaintance with the subject, but also for those already familiar with it. One of the greatest gifts of this book... is to re-astonish readers with the simple fact of the newness of all this.”
–Min Wild, The Independent on Sunday

“A valuable contribution to popular Shakespeare scholarship... A feat of synthesis... Each page is dense with well-chosen information and sensible, sensitive interpretation.”
–Peter Wentworth, The Literary Times Supplement

“This collaborative Shakespeare makes a refreshing change from the autistic monarch of the stage... Wit its lightly worn learning and its refreshing argument, this is a rewarding and readable book. Anyone who wants to understand Shakespeare will learn from it.”
–Colin Burrow, Evening Standard

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0713997737
• ISBN 13: 9780713997736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 285