books about WS, etc.

WILL & ME by Dominic Dromgoole. I loved every minute of it.

How about Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life by Dominic Dromgoole? For 97 cents, I just now ordered it from Amazon and think I"ll be able to comment on it soon.

forgive me for screwing up the title. it is a fine book, well worth the trouble. i'll look forward to your comments.

ME & SHAKESPEARE by Herman Gollob goofed me up.
It's an excellent book, too. The subtitle is ADVENTURES WITH THE BARD. Gollob & Dromgoole talk to the heart.
Naren559: I love to pass along suggestions. Please feel free to do the same.

I'm reading Shakespeare: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd at the moment. Amongst other things Ackroyd's descriptions of the physical surroundings of Shakespeare's family, and how they (the physical surroundings) would have influenced Will, are giving me more insight into the plays.

Thrin: did you read ann barton's review in NY Review of Books? 11 May 2006. I love Ackroyds books. He is playful. Some don't care much for playfullness.

#6 poor-ious: Thanks for guiding me to the NY RoB article. Very interesting. I know what you mean about "playfullness" (I think), although I did find Ackroyd's "Dickens" a bit much... too rich a pudding for me.

I've got a book called 'Shakespeare for alle tider' by Stanley Wells. Its English title is Shakespeare - For All Time (Illustrated. 450 big pages).

I haven't read it yet. Should I?

the mixture as before. wells is one of the grand old men of Shakespeare studies. i read these books for the peculiarities of style, etc. etc. if the book isn't amusing, let's say, in the way A L Rowse's "sexy nose," was amusing, then out the window it goes.
pgt

Not a book on WS himself, but about the difficulties of having to form a theater company in order to stage The War of the Roses plays when the RSC deemed them unprofitable: The English Shakespeare Company by leading man and director Michael Pennington and Michael Bogdanov.

Re 10: A good choice although IIRC the RSC were planning and then producing their Plantagenets cycle at almost exactly the same time. It is however true that the ESC included the second tetralogy as well. Although I personally preferred the RSC productions which I saw four times the ESC were also pretty fantastic when I caught the last week in London (I still treasure my video recordings). I think the only unrelieved failure was Bogdanov's treatment of Joan of Arc - and he was entitled to at least one bodgeup!

Adding touchstones:
- Will & Me
- Me and Shakespeare

>11 TheHumbleOne: The RSC performed Richard II at Stratford in their 1980-81 season, and Henry V in their 1984 season. I believe at that point they hadn't performed Henry IV since the 1975-76 season in Stratford.
Pennington says he didn't take part in the 1985 production of Richard II as the National Theatre refused to pay the going rate for the lead in such a role. But if the RSC did the trilogy that year it's not in their archives. The ESC was performing all the plays (adding Richard II the second year) consecutively for two years on a worldwide tour. Not that anyone could blame RSC or the National Theatre from seeing the concept as unprofitable.
You are certainly lucky to have seen all these productions.

Has anyone read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt?

>14 Muscogulus: Has anyone read Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt?

Fascinating, but very speculative in places.

>14 Muscogulus: I have that one on my shelf and hope to get to it this year as I have a WS category in my challenge this year.

>15 southernbooklady: thanks for the warning. I haven't read reviews on it.

I've just finished Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson. I liked it, especially as Bryson refuses to make assumptions or pose theories about Shakespeare's personal life.

>15 southernbooklady: and >16 mstrust:
I just now finished Will in the World. I agree with southernbooklady that it's "('...(f)ascinating, but very speculative in places..')" But even though I'm not sure I agree with some of Greenblatt's conclusions, I've enjoyed reading about them, since they bring out associated facts about Shakespeare and his time that I wasn't familiar with.

I just finished The Book of William by Paul Collins, about the Shakespeare First Folio, and really enjoyed it, highly recommend it. Was wondering if anyone has ever been to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., I am thinking of going for a visit.

Thanks for listing The Book of William. Collins is a favorite author of mine and I didn't know he'd written on a book on Shakespeare.
Sorry to say that I haven't been to the Folger but it's on my wishlist.

>19 justmybooks410: and >20 mstrust: - I plan to go, although I've been told that it's smaller than you expect. Don't know quite what that means, although at one time, this person said it's smaller than one room. But that was a while ago.

Awww, even if it is one small room, it would be a glorious room. Enjoy your visit!

I haven't been there for more than fifty years, but I remember that there was a single exhibit hall, pretty large, with lots of interesting stuff. The building itself is interesting, with sculpted friezes of various characters and scenes. Classic art deco on the outside, Tudor woodwork on the interior. There is also an Elizabethan-style theater. The library is near all the usual Capital sights so doesn't take much time out of your schedule. Not primarily a museum but worth a visit. The first folio alone is worth a visit, IMHO. The setup, as I hinted, may have changed over the years but I sort of doubt it.

Thanks for the details. Yes, I agree that no matter how small...

Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan. I got on to this from the Biographical Notes section of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World that describes it as "the most thorough, informative, and steadily thoughtful" of recent biographies about Shakespeare. With respect to my own limited reading, I agree.

Though it has a considerable amount of biographical information, I don't think that that is the primary purpose of Greenblatt's book. It definitely is the primary purpose of Honan's book. I found it to be very readable.

I've read The Book of William by Paul Collins now and also highly recommend it. He travels the world and tracks as many First Folios as he can.

>26 mstrust:

Agreed, The Book of William was extremely interesting.

Old thread, new book...

I'm currently reading a very interesting book, The Shakespeare Circle. Instead of rehashing and speculating on what we know about the man himself it focuses on his context, the people around him, his family, fellow Stratford citizens, fellow actors, other playwrights, etc.

Amazon doesn't seem to have a 'Look Inside' for it, but here's the Cambridge U Press page for it which lists the contributors behind a click. http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/renaissance-and-early-m...

>28 Crypto-Willobie: Instead of rehashing and speculating on what we know about the man himself it focuses on his context, the people around him, his family, fellow Stratford citizens, fellow actors, other playwrights, etc.

The Lodger Shakespeare is good for that. It recreates the London Shakespeare saw while he lived in rented rooms on Silver Street in 1612. It's jumping off point is a fragment of a court document -- a deposition Shakespeare actually made in regards to a case involving his landlord. Charles Nicholl uses that moment as a kind of hub to delve into what the streets of the neighborhood looked like, and the kind of company Shakespeare kept at the time.

>29 southernbooklady:
Agreed, I enjoyed that book too. It's been a few years since I read it, so it's not fresh in my mind. But one of the chapters in The Shakespeare Circle (as it happens written by LT member dkathman) revisits Silver Street in a briefer format with a slightly different emphasis.

>29 southernbooklady:

I finally bought The Lodger last year at Summer School! All I have to do now is find time to read it.

>13 mstrust:
Indeed - it was only some time later that the RSC had a go at all 8 plays (including all three Henry VIs) for the This England project which btw included my favourite Richard II with Sam West and David Troughton.

The ESC of course followed tradition by messing about with Henry VI showing them as but two plays, as did the RSC Plantagenets series - the latter also ended "Edward IV" with Anton Lesser's Gloucester cooing over the infant Edward V only to turn to the audience with a "NOW!". Naughty but effective!

I've just finished reading and I recommend J. Thomas Looney 's Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford .

For those interested in exploring the odd byways of conspiracy theorists, Looney's book does have a certain academic appeal. However for some perspective about the whole field of Shakespeare-wasn't-really-the-author claims, James Shapiro's "Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" is highly recommended. Included in the book's historical survey of the growth of interest in Shakespeare as he went from being a popular writer from a middleclass background overshadowed by Ben Jonson and the team of Beaumont and Fletcher in the late 17th century to the greatest writer in the English language by the end of the 18th century and beyond is a survey of Looney's book. It and the fundamental flaws in his reasoning are among the topics covered by Shapiro.

Shapiro also provides a quick review countering anti-Shakespearean claims about his authorship, but for a much more detailed write-up of the historical record, see The Shakespeare Authorship Page. A subsection of that site provides the historical evidence showing how we know that the glover's son from Stratford was the real author. Though scholars would like to know a lot more about Shakespeare than we do, the amount of information in the historical record is much more copious than anti-Shakespeareans acknowledge. If Looney was aware of any of this, he shows no evidence of it.

>34 Podras.:

By all means any interested readers should of course give any and all sources which Podras recommends, including Shapiro's books and the Shakespeare authorship site cited above, their full and fair reading--as soon as they've finished a first reading of J.T.L.'s cited book.

Of course Looney was well aware of the views of and the evidence for the orthodox Stratfordian account of his day of Shakespeare's personal history. It was, after all, his work which relates his study of it and then his demolition of it, fully exposing it as logically preposterous in the course of presenting a clear picture of the person actually indicated by the evidence.

>35 proximity1:

If you intend to pursue an anti-Shakespearean argument, perhaps it would be best to carry on in the thread reserved for that purpose, Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? rather than in this one. It was just recently been pointed out to me, too.

In beginning to read the posts there, I learned about a book that sounds very interesting; Scott McCrea's The Case For Shakespeare: The End of Authorship Question. I'll be very interested in seeing what it has to say.

This isn't a book recommendation, but it might serve as good as one. FutureLearn has a free Shakespeare MOOC titled Shakespeare and His World starting April 18. The course is conducted by Sir Jonathan Bate, one of the world's foremost Shakespearean scholars. This will be its fourth iteration, the previous three having been very well received. There is a brief video on the course description page that provides more information.

It's rather a fun MOOC and Bate does his talking head bit. aided by props, very well. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro. 1599 to be exact, the year he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet! Don't you wish you had years like that? A tale well told, and I'm looking forward to Shapiro's follow-up, The Year of Lear.

Another recent one I'd recommend is The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography. This consists of short but scholarly biographies of the people around WS -- his parents, siblings, schoolmates, townsmen, fellow actors, fellow playwrights, London contacts, etc. Provides a good context.

James Shapiro's The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, his latest book and very much in the vein of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, focuses on King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, all three very much catering to interests of King James I.

I found the contemporary history leading up to Macbeth to be especially good. I was aware that the play drew inspiration from 1605's Gunpowder Plot and that the porter's talk about "equivocators" was supposed to be a direct reference to it (Act II, Scene 3. Macbeth also in V.5), but Shapiro shows that Shakespeare's audience, from revelations coming out of the aftermath of the plot, would have been highly alert to what was then a fairly new concept, one that the play is thematically riddled with throughout.

Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells is an online book about the authorship question that is highly recommended. It is downloadable, highly readable, mercifully short, and to the point.

>40 Crypto-Willobie:

The Shakespeare Circle caused a bit of a stir when it was first announced because of David Fallow's revisionist view of Shakespeare's father, John. (Fallow wrote the chapter on John.) Based on new analysis, Fallow posits that John never experienced the financial hardships that many scholars believe he suffered from beginning in the mid 1570s. Rather, he was adroitly defending himself from a changing legal environment that threatened his unlicensed wool brokering business and manipulating assets to avoid taxation. Here is a link to an article about the piece in the Guardian about John's business dealings. Fallow's essay is a lot less dramatic than the Guardian article makes it seem--though it is good, but if Fallow's analysis is accepted by scholars in general, there is considerable potential for a reassessment of the impact of John's financial situation on William's early career.

In the same vein as Fallow's reassessment of John's financial situation, Robert Bearman's forthcoming Shakespeare's Money: How Much Did He Make and What Did This Mean? makes a major reassessment of William's financial situation. The Amazon blurb gives a good overview. Its current release date in the US is June 7, but, I believe it will be available sooner in the UK.

>43 Podras.:
Thanks for the links. I remember seeing that Guardian piece. I've now put the Bearman on my Amazon wishlist (thoug I may buy it elsewhere).

>40 Crypto-Willobie:
I keep meaning to buy The Shakespeare Circle not only on its own merits (and to support The Birthplace Trust) but also in order to appraise Alexander Waugh's contemptuous dismissal in his Spectator review.

I will admit however to a prejudice in favour of Messrs Edmondson and Wells as editors - especially since the latter is one of the few people I would hesitate to argue with over these matters (despite his deplorable omission of Harriet Walter from Great Shakespeare Actors).

>46 TheHumbleOne:
Not to mention Joseph Taylor and Charles Hart.

I know I've seen Harriet Walters in something but can't remember what...

Reading Shakespeare's Mind Manchester University Press, (2018) by Steve Sohmer

Still less than three years old, this is a very notable and worthy (relatively recent) addition to Shakespeare criticism.

I recommend it to anyone looking for a good recent work of Shakespeare literary criticism.