William Shakespeare

George Brandes' William Shakespeare: A Critical Study is a sweeping portrait of Shakespeare as both artist and man, tracing his life from Stratford boyhood to his final years in the theater and in retirement. Brandes begins with the difficulty of writing Shakespeare's biography at all, since the surviving record is so fragmentary, and shows how legal documents, early traditions, and careful interpretation must reconstruct a life only partly known. He then evokes Stratford's mixed world of beauty and hardship, Shakespeare's family background, his education, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, the births of his children, and the local tensions that may have driven him toward London. From there, the book follows Shakespeare's artistic development through the early comedies, histories, sonnets, and the great tragedies and romances. Brandes reads Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest as stages in a deepening inner drama, shaped by Elizabethan and Jacobean politics, religion, and culture. He pays special attention to characters such as Falstaff, Portia, Shylock, Brutus, Iago, Lear, Coriolanus, and Prospero, while exploring Shakespeare's changing attitudes toward love, power, money, nationality, death, and the stage itself. The result is a rich critical biography of a playwright who is shown as a living force shaping his age. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.