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Covering 400 years of Shakespeare scholarship, Schoenbaum's now classic William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life received high acclaim from critics and scholars. The New York Review of Books called it "a masterpiece," and the Guardian labeled it "our best life of Shakespeare."Making the resources of the world's greatest Shakespeare collections more accessible to all readers, this updated "Compact Life" contains a refined and amplified version of the original text and fifty of the original documents reproduced in smaller format. Schoenbaum has incorporated new material into his narrative, including an eyewitness account, in harrowing detail, of a murder believed to have occurred in New Place, the house that Shakespeare bought in Stratford in 1597. He also provides a new postscript which includes newly-compiled information from recent research on Shakespeare.
This work investigates the life and historical reality of William Shakespeare by synthesizing four centuries of archival scholarship into a singular, accessible documentary narrative. S. Schoenbaum, a distinguished scholar in the field, utilizes his extensive expertise to curate and analyze primary source documents, effectively stripping away centuries of myth to reveal the man behind the plays. By grounding his biography in verifiable records rather than conjecture, he constructs a rigorous framework that prioritizes historical evidence over literary speculation.
What You Will Find
Critics and scholars widely regard this text as a foundational resource for understanding the historical Shakespeare. Readers frequently note the meticulous nature of the research and the clarity with which Schoenbaum presents complex archival data.
Page Count:
384
Publication Date:
1987-05-14
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0195051610
ISBN-13:
9780195051612
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