What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
Sir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteries of how Shakespeare lived, whom and how he loved, how he worked, how he produced some of the greatest and most abidingly popular works in the history of world literature and drama, have fascinated readers for centuries. This concise, crystalline book conjures illuminating insights to reveal Shakespeare as he was. Wells brings the writer and dramatist alive, in all his fascinating humanity, for readers of today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This illuminating compilation from Wells (Shakespeare's Tragedies), honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, collects his lectures speculating on Shakespeare's character. In "What Manner of Man Was He?" Wells suggests that fond references to Shakespeare in the poems and private notebooks of his contemporaries indicate he was "liked and admired," and contends that the playwright cared deeply about his family, as illustrated by his investment in large Stratford-upon-Avon estates, where his wife and children lived, while spending relatively little on the London quarters he kept to be close to the Globe theater. Wells analyzes in "What Made Shakespeare Laugh?" how Shakespeare's comedies reveal his sense of humor, and contemplates his authorial practices in "How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?" which notes that the Bard likely consulted with his company on "the subject matter and style" of plays and had to balance artistic ambition against such practical concerns as not engaging "directly with contemporary political issues" at risk of drawing the monarch's wrath. Wells's brisk style makes this an unusually breezy discourse on the playwright, even if it's not always convincing, as when Wells contends that Sonnet 144's reference to "two loves... of comfort and despair," personified as a man and a woman, implies Shakespeare may have been bisexual. Still, this helps separate the man from the myth. Photos.
