The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron

The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron PDF Author: Leo Daugherty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604978469
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Lord Ferdinando Stanley was the fifth earl of Derby, a leading claimant to the throne. Considered a man who had everything, he was also the patron of the company of players which was fortunate enough to include William Shakespeare. One April Fool's Day, 1594, he was reportedly approached by a witch (one of the famous legion of "Lancashire witches") and they engaged in brief conversation while strolling outside his largest palace, Lathom Hall. Four days later, he fell violently ill. For twelve days he lingered, while four of the best doctors in the country, including the famous Dr. John Case of Oxford, labored in vain to save him.Who killed Lord Stanley and why? Historians started debating that question almost as soon as he died, and outraged gossip was to be heard everywhere in England. This second edition studies the death of Lord Derby within the immediate contexts of Elizabethan power politics, succession mania, passionate religious controversy, the records of prominent families in the North, and the cult of personality just then beginning to become a major factor in the nation's social history. The book's scope also includes subcultural contexts such as Elizabethan poetry (Lord Derby was a pastoral love poet, some of whose work survives), witchcraft, medicine, spy networks, and both approved and disapproved methods of political assassination (with poison being the most frowned upon because of its disreputable "Italianate" connotations).

The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron

The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron PDF Author: Leo Daugherty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604978469
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lord Ferdinando Stanley was the fifth earl of Derby, a leading claimant to the throne. Considered a man who had everything, he was also the patron of the company of players which was fortunate enough to include William Shakespeare. One April Fool's Day, 1594, he was reportedly approached by a witch (one of the famous legion of "Lancashire witches") and they engaged in brief conversation while strolling outside his largest palace, Lathom Hall. Four days later, he fell violently ill. For twelve days he lingered, while four of the best doctors in the country, including the famous Dr. John Case of Oxford, labored in vain to save him.Who killed Lord Stanley and why? Historians started debating that question almost as soon as he died, and outraged gossip was to be heard everywhere in England. This second edition studies the death of Lord Derby within the immediate contexts of Elizabethan power politics, succession mania, passionate religious controversy, the records of prominent families in the North, and the cult of personality just then beginning to become a major factor in the nation's social history. The book's scope also includes subcultural contexts such as Elizabethan poetry (Lord Derby was a pastoral love poet, some of whose work survives), witchcraft, medicine, spy networks, and both approved and disapproved methods of political assassination (with poison being the most frowned upon because of its disreputable "Italianate" connotations).

The Genius of Shakespeare

The Genius of Shakespeare PDF Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195128239
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The Genius of Shakespeare is a new kind of biography: a biography of Shakespeare's talent and reputation, beyond the limits of his actual life. Part One explores the origins and development of his works, Part Two traces their effects on succeeding generations, and demonstrates how Shakespeare came to be regarded as the supreme dramatist.

Burghley

Burghley PDF Author: Stephen Alford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–1598), was the closest adviser to England’s Queen Elizabeth I and—as this revealing and provocative biography shows—he was the driving force behind the Queen's reign for four decades. Cecil’s impact on the development of the English state was deep and personal. A committed Protestant, he guided domestic and foreign affairs with the confidence of his religious conviction. Believing himself the divinely instigated protector of his monarch, he felt able to disobey her direct commands. He was uncompromising, obsessive, and supremely self-assured—a cunning politician as well as a consummate servant. This comprehensive biography gives proper weight to Cecil's formative years, his subtle navigation of the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, his lifelong enmity with Mary Queen of Scots, and his obsession with family dynasty. It also provides a fresh account of Elizabeth I and her reign, uncovering limitations and concerns about invasions, succession, and conspiracy. Intimate, authoritative, and enormously readable, this book redefines our understanding of the Elizabethan period.

Shakespeare's Professional Career

Shakespeare's Professional Career PDF Author: Peter Thomson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521666411
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Describes Shakespeare at work in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and professional life.

Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe

Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.

The Rational Shakespeare

The Rational Shakespeare PDF Author: Michael Wainwright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319952587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191586099
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
Shakespeare's Sonnets are among the most complex and beautiful poems ever written. Their exploration of love, praise, homo- and hetero-sexual desire is enacted in the richest, densest writing in English. And the first printed work to which Shakespeare's name was attached was the erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, which developed a sumptuous vocabulary in which to explore love, praise of the beloved, sexual desire, and the power of rhetoric. That poem was so popular that most of Shakespeare's contemporaries thought of him as primarily a poet, rather than a playwright. Yet despite the power of Shakespeare's poems, and their foundational place within his oeuvre, modern readers have seldom been encouraged to engage with his non-dramatic works as a whole. This new edition explains how this state of affairs has arisen, and why it needs to be changed. The volume contains the complete Sonnets and poems with a full commentary. An extensive and lively introduction explores Shakespeare's poetic development, and shows how the poems relate to each other and to his dramatic works. The Sonnets are freshly interpreted, not as cryptic fragments of autobiography, but as works which ask their readers to think about relationships between lyric poems and the historical circumstances which may have given rise to them. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are placed where they belong, at the origin of Shakespeare's thinking about what it means to desire and to be desired. The edition responds to the most recent scholarly work on the interpretation and dating of Shakespeare's poems and Sonnets. It also explores what the poems may have meant to their earliest readers. For this reason it also includes poems attributed to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, as well as those printed under his name in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.

The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets Unfolded

The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets Unfolded PDF Author: Gerald Massey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description


Shakespeare's Workplace

Shakespeare's Workplace PDF Author: Andrew Gurr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316739244
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Shakespeare was easily the most inventive writer using the English language. His plays give us intricacies of vocabulary and usage that have enriched us immeasurably. This book provides a series of analytical essays on the marginalia relating to the plays. Each of them is a searching and authoritative account, packed with details, of some of the more peculiar conditions under which Shakespeare and his peers composed their playbooks. Among the essays are two completely new contributions. Altogether they reveal fresh details about the input of the playing companies, playhouses, individual players and even their controller, the Revels Office, to the complex fragments that we now have of the Shakespearean world. Gurr examines Shakespeare's own choice between playwriting and poetry, the requirements of working in a playhouse that wraps itself around the stage, and its impact on the creation of such figures as Henry V, Shylock, Isabella, King Lear and Coriolanus.

Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom

Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom PDF Author: Charles Beauclerk
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802197140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
“A book for anyone who loves Shakespeare . . . One of the most scandalous and potentially revolutionary theories about the authorship of these immortal works.” —Mark Rylance, First Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre It is perhaps the greatest story never told: the truth behind the most enduring works of literature in the English language, perhaps in any language. Who was William Shakespeare? Critically acclaimed historian Charles Beauclerk has spent more than two decades researching the authorship question, and if the plays were discovered today, he argues, we would see them for what they are—shocking political works written by a court insider, someone with the monarch’s indulgence, shielded from repression in an unstable time of armada and reformation. But the author’s identity was quickly swept under the rug after his death. The official history—of an uneducated merchant writing in near obscurity, and of a virginal queen married to her country—dominated for centuries. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom delves deep into the conflicts and personalities of Elizabethan England, as well as the plays themselves, to tell the true story of the “Soul of the Age.” “Beauclerk’s learned, deep scholarship, compelling research, engaging style and convincing interpretation won me completely. He has made me view the whole Elizabethan world afresh. The plays glow with new life, exciting and real, infused with the soul of a man too long denied his inheritance.” —Sir Derek Jacobi