Midsummer Night's Dream

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Written from the premise that to know Shakespeare's world is to better understand his work, this book presents the playwright's life in its proper Elizabethan and Jacobean context. Readers should find the text comprehensive in its treatment of Shakespeare's home and family, his education, London and the theatre as it was in his day, and the political, social, cultural and literary influences exerted by Elizabeth I and James I.

Covering 400 years of Shakespeare scholarship, Schoenbaum's now classic William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life received high acclaim from critics and scholars.

The product of exhaustive research by an Oxford scholar, this masterly study (The New Yorker) combines historical fact with a practical discussion of Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets, interwoven with relevant moments from his life and age to create an accessible chronicle and an engaging read.

A polemical attack on the ways recent Shakespeare biographers have disguised their lack of information. How can biographies of Shakespeare continue to appear when so little is known about him? And when what is known has been in the public domain for so long? In the past decade, the majority of these biographies have been published by distinguished Shakespeareans - shouldn't they know better? To solve this puzzle, David Ellis looks at the methods that Shakespeare's biographers have used to hide their lack of knowledge. At the same time, by exploring efforts to write a life of Shakespeare along traditional lines, it asks what kind of animal 'biography' really is and how it should bewritten.