William Shakespeare
His Life and Work
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Who was William Shakespeare? How did the 'rude groom' from Stratford grow up to be the greatest poet the world has known? Not for a generation, since the late Anthony Burgess's SHAKESPEARE (1970), has there been anything approaching a popular, mainstream biography of the greatest and most celebrated writer. Yet Shakespeare's life was as colourful, varied and dramatic as his works: the Warwickshire country boy who 'disappeared' for seven years before fetching up in London as an apprentice actor...whose fellow players could scarcely keep up with the plays he turned out for them...who rapidly became a favourite at the court of Elizabeth I...and returned to Stratford a prosperous 'gentleman', proud to realise his father's dream of a family coat of arms, before his death at 52.
Anthony Holden brilliantly interleaves the poets own words with the known facts to breathe new life into a story never before told in such absorbing detail. 'The perfect blend of erudition and accessibility' - the Daily Telegraph's verdict on Holden's life of Tchaikovsky - applies equally to his revealing, very human portrait of Shakespeare.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time bardographer (and biographer of Olivier and Prince Charles), Holden colorfully if superficially fills in the blanks between Shakespeare's vast output of verse and the paltry official record, which leaves much about the man to speculation. Unlike Park Honan's recent, soberly deductive life, and more in tune with Harold Bloom's and Anthony Burgess's zealous conjectures, Holden's kitchen-sink approach packs in his own hypotheses based on circumstantial evidence, recent biographic theories and all the hoary old traditions. Regarding the early "lost years," Holden supports the Lancashire hypothesis, that the young Catholic William "Shakeshafte" was a tutor and amateur actor in the stately home of a recusant Lancastrian nobleman. Holden further speculates that the legend of the deer-poaching Will's escape to London after a run-in with an anti-Catholic Warwickshire knight had as much to do with religious persecution as theft. As Shakespeare's life progresses, Holden's guesswork becomes less convincing in explaining such mysteries as the identities of the sonnets' Dark Lady (just an amalgamation) and their dedicatee, "Mr. W.H." (his brother-in-law, William Hathaway). With the better established facts of the Globe's theatrical world, Holden's biography loses some of its energy. Sometimes reading dubiously between the lines of Shakespeare's plays, such as projecting Macbeth's insomnia on the Bard, Holden sums up the actor-playwright-poet's final change of roles into Stratford's first citizen. 8 pages color, 8 pages b&w illus. not seen by PW.
