Taking seriously the commonplace that a man is known by the company he keeps—and particularly by the company he keeps over his lifetime—one can learn more about just about anyone by learning more about his friends. By applying this notion to Shakespeare, this book offers insight into the life of the most famous playwright in history, and one of the most elusive figures in literature. The book consists of sketches of Shakespeare's contact and relationships with the people known to have been close friends or acquaintances, revealing aspects of the poet's life by emphasizing ways in which his life was intertwined with theirs.
This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed study of Shakespeare’s fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. From the knockabout clowns of the early comedies, through the wise fools of the mature plays, to disturbing tragic figures who play the fool, Shakespeare dramatizes the pleasures and perils of fooling and folly, and evokes the mysterious possibilities of "foolosophy." Esteemed scholar Robert H. Bell highlights the fun, wit, insight, and mystery of some of Shakespeare’s most vibrant and sometimes vexing figures.
Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage
Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith offers a complete review of current scholarship on Shakespeare and religion and a fresh perspective on the vexed question of the dramatist's religious orientation. It throws new light on the issue by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. The book argues in particular that faith was more of a quest than a quiet certainty for the playwright
In the context of classical and Renaissance theories of imitation, or mimesis, Shakespeare's Imitations discusses features of four plays by Shakespeare that imitate materials outside but especially within the same plays. The book argues that an imitation does not merely repeat its model, it completes and deciphers it: the model, that is, can begin to be understood fully only after its imitation is apprehended as an interpretation of it.
Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing;
