Shakespeare: A Life
Price:
$34.95 (01)Description
In the last ten years, virtually every previously known fact about Shakespeare has been modified by new research. Park Honan draws on this new information to dramatically alter our perceptions of the actor, poet, and playwright.Here is virtually all that can be factually known or reasonably speculated about Shakespeare's life. Readers will find a vivid picture of what Shakespeare's childhood might have been like in the small English town of Stratford, which had but a dozen streets in 1560. We meet his father, John Shakespeare, the glovemaker of Henley Street, who rose to the office of High Bailiff and Justice of the Peace before he was beset by financial difficulties. There is a fascinating portrait of London and of the life of an Elizabethan actor (a neophyte Shakespeare may have had to learn as many as a hundred small parts per season). Honan casts new light on the young poet's relationships--his early courtship of Anne Hathaway, their marriage, his attitudes to women such as Jennet Davenant, Marie Mountjoy, and his own daughters--illuminating Shakespeare's needs, habits, passions, and concerns. The author shows in fresh detail that Shakespeare was well acquainted with violent crime and murder in daily life. And he also examines the world of the playing companies--the power of patronage, theatrical conditions, and personal rivalries--to reveal the relationship between the man and the writing.
Park Honan's Shakespeare casts new light on a complex and fascinating life, illuminating Shakespeare's extraordinary development into the greatest dramatist of his or any age.
Reviews
"If you have never read a book about William Shakespeare, please read this one....Exceptional....Honan examines virtually all of Shakespeare's work in impressive detail, weaving his staggeringly clear knowledge of establishable historic fact with literary scholarship."--Michael Parkenham, Baltimore Sun
"Because so little documentation remains of Shakespeare's life, many myths have grown out of the Bard's comings and goings, and especially out of his love life. Honan's recent biography...dispels many of the myths and goes a long way toward humanizing the legend and putting his life and work in the proper perspective."--The Oakland Tribune
"In engaging detail, Honan conveys the beleaguered state of the theater, which was attacked by religious authorities and shut down by civil ones during the plague times.... Honan portrays all the more plausibly just how extraordinary Shakespeare's life work was.... Throughout Honan summons up Shakespeare's material world so we can understand both its ideological structure and the resources it offered a poet."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The best available biography...a great deal of the text in this scrupulously researched account seems freshly minted.... Honan's Shakespeare is good natured, sociable, and extraordinary by any measure. The balance of the biographical, the historical, and the critical is neatly maintained."--Robert Taylor, Boston Globe
About the Author(s)
Park Honan is Emeritus Professor at the School of English, University of Leeds. He has written biographies of Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning, and lives in the United Kingdom.
