Shakespeare: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

Book Overview

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385511396
• ISBN13: 9780385511391
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 572 Pages
• Weight: 2.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.7" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Very Good!

A "MUST READ" ! I strongly recommend it ! -D.D. --FL,USA

Lively, elegant, and wonderfully readable

Writing about the life of William Shakespeare is a bit like trying to catch an echo with your hands. Public records verify the existence of a William Shakespeare who was born and raised in Stratford and then became a resident of London. However, there is no direct proof that this man, the son of a modestly affluent glover, was responsible for the plays and poems that have immortalized his name. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this uncertainty, Shakespearean biography has proved a fertile scholarly enterprise since the publication of Edward Dowden's 1875 book, SHAKESPEARE: A CRITICAL STUDY OF HIS MIND AND ART. Among the thousands of biographies that have ensued, two groundbreaking analytical studies, released in recent years by Stephen Greenblatt and Margery Garber, raise the question of authorship. (Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford de Vere are among those suggested as possible authors for this substantial body of work.) Peter Ackroyd's SHAKESPEARE: A BIOGRAPHY appears, then, at a time when matters of attribution are a source of contention. Well-known for his spirited biographies of Sir Thomas More, Blake, Dickens and T. S. Eliot, Ackroyd assumes that the Shakespeare of public record is indeed the man who wrote the plays and poems. This approach is neither naïve nor uninformative; his aim throughout is to illustrate how the works themselves illuminate the writer's lived experience as a confident, enterprising man of his day. Thus, the book jacket accurately boasts, "[Ackroyd's] method is to position the playwright in the context of his world, exploring everything from Stratford's humble town to its fields of wildflowers; discerning influences on the plays from unexpected quarters; and entering London with the playwright as modern theatre, as we know it, is just beginning to emerge." One of SHAKESPEARE's many virtues is its consideration of the rich and varied contexts of village and city life in sixteenth-century England. We learn, for example, that the flora and fauna of Stratford-upon-Avon (a street along the river) is conversant with the extensive references to weeds and wildflowers in Shakespeare's plays; his lifelong proximity to water made him especially attentive to its tides and occasional floods --- images also prevalent in his work; and his father's trade as a glover probably informed the writer's intimate and complex metaphors about gloves. This approach is interesting in itself. But Ackroyd further suggests that the playwright's social, cultural and religious views were symptomatic of his time. If the preservation of Shakespeare's childhood home reveals a situation that allowed little privacy, this indicates the lack of privacy afforded to most people of that time; if Shakespeare's father occasionally violated a strict regulation in village law and was fined, his struggle to balance individual expression with social responsibility was a challenge for others, too; and if Shakespeare's ambiguous sexuality

Read this instead of Will in the World

Currently, I'm doing research for a paper on the Fools and Buffoons in Shakespeare's Comedies. I turned to this book as a basic biography of Shakespeare's life, for background reading for my paper topic. I was not disappointed. Peter Ackrod brings to life not only the playwright himself, but London and Elizabethan theatre. He uses exquisite detail to render a satisfactory portrait of his subjects. Although Shakespeare is perhaps the best-known author in the English language, it is surprising how little is known about his life. Many authors have conjectured about his life based upon the material that appears in his plays. Shakespeare was born in the town of Stratford to John and Mary Shakespeare. In the town grammar school, he learned Greek, Latin, and all the other subjects that school children of the 16th century would have studied. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was already pregnant with their first child, Sussannah. Later on, the couple would have two more children, twins: Hamnet, who would die as a child, and Judith. Not long after the marriage, however, Shakespeare set out to London to find his fortune there. He started off his career in the theatre by holding horses for gentlemen as they went inside. Later, Shakespeare would serve in varying roles such as prompter, actor, and of course playwright. It is during his time as an actor that Shakespeare began to write. Shakespeare got many of his stories from other writers. It was not plagiarism as we think of it today; it was true then that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. He borrowed not only from classical writers, but comtemporary ones such as Christopher Marlowe as well. In this book the reader gets an excellent sense of the theatrical world as it existed in 16th century England. The writers were all rivals, but they were collaborators who admired the others' work as well. The book takes us through the writing of many of his different plays. Ackroyd does not give us plot synopses, or analysis; rather, he gives the history of each play itself. As I have mentioned before, not much is known about Shakespeare's life in London; but the author puts the peices together carefully, basing surmises upon actual facts. It is impressive scholarship. Ackroyd, not a Shakespeare scholar himself, but an enthusiast, documents his sources well. He does mention Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt, in his bibliography, but does not cite him in the body of the text. All of Ackroyd's sources are certifiably excellent scholarship, showing that this particular author takes his work very seriously. I reccommend reading this book instead of Will in the World; there is more substance to Shakespeare: A Biography.

Shakespeare's life is brilliantly explored by Peter Ackroyd

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)is the greatest dramatist and English poet in history. All aspects of human life-the muck and moil, toil and tragedy, gaiety, romantic love, glory, honor, kingship, prejudice and those thousand natural shocks that make us human are exposed in all their reality by the master from Stratford on Avon in Warwackshire. In the countless books on Shakespeare this one by Peter Ackroyd stands out like a Mt. Everest among lesser peaks. The book is outstanding because: 1. Ackroyd goes to the sources reporting what we can know about Shakespeare based on family, church and court records which survive the long centuries. 2. He briefly explores the genesis of the plays. 3. He shows us how Shakespeare worked as a dramatist with player companies in the rough and tumble London literary scene. He wrote for plays to be produced in a time of plagues, riots, threats against the government, fires and countless difficulties in getting plays published and perfomed. 4. He looks at Shakespeare's rivalries with other eminent men of the theatre such as Ben Jonson and most notably Christopher Marlow. We seek Shakespeare learning stagecraft and honing his incomparable pen to produce such immortal works as Hamlet, Macbeth, the history plays and such sparkling comedies as Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night. 6. Ackroyd takes us to the teeming streets of London. We smell, taste, touch, dress and think like Elizabethians would do in their colorful, violent world of a brutal age. 7. Shakespeare is an enigma. We will never know the real man behind the glory of his written words. Ackroyd, though, brings us as close as we are likely to get to what it was like to be William Shakespeare making a living as a playwright and actor. The book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about the bard of Avon. It is written in a popular style grounded in fantastic scholarship. A fascinating and important book!

Amazing

I felt a genuine amazement as I dipped into this wonderful biography of Shakespeare. I started sceptically, wondering how a satisfying biography could be written of a figure that many have doubted even wrote the works for which his name has become known. Ackroyd handles this dillema beautifully by sometimes ignoring and otherwise illustrating that such speculations are poppycock. Little question remains that Shakespeare was a real man who wrote the works for which he is credited. In this biography, there is a real warm blooded man living and creating in a real time in history. What most amazed and fascinated me by this work is how completely Ackroyd created the minutiae of William's world while building up the structure of William's life. By minutiae, I do not mean dull plodding lists of details. Not at all. I mean the vital details that provide the fertile ground out of which a person's life grows, takes shape, and becomes what it becomes. You learn effortlessly about the wealth of his parents and relatives and how such wealth was acquired, and what it meant to acquire or not acquire wealth in those days. You learn what London was like when Shakespeare first went there. What role acting groups and theaters had in those days. And how William came to create his own theater. Most importantly, you learn the events that stimulated his writing plays in addition to being an actor in those (and others) plays. This type of information and more is woven together to create a picture of the world that Shakespeare lived in while creating a breathing portrait of the man himself. There are a number of other books out this year on Shakespeare. Having read Ackroyd's bio, it's hard to imagine any of them replacing it or being more satisfying.

Setting a Background you can Almost Smell

For a person of so much fame, we know surprisingly little about the details of the life of Shakespeare. Even this latest biography is filled with 'it is believed,' Shakespeare 'may have,' and other suppositions based on at best educated guess work. Mr. Ackroyd gets around this by presenting a story of Shakespeare's life but with what is known about the people around him and the times themselves. The stench, the sounds, the political intrigues of the time are better known and provide a background in the world in which Shakespeare lived. I kept finding myself thinking of the movie 'Shakespeare in Love,' not for the story, but for the background. Left to my wondering is similar to that of other geniuses like say Einstein. How did Shakespeare, apparently of modest background, average education become such a consumate master of his art that his plays are still being read, studied and produced three centuries later. And consider how well they have stood translation into more modern English.