British Playwrights - Literary Biography, British Poets - Literary Biography, Theater Biography - Playwrights
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Overview
William Shakespeare has been the lodestar of English literature, not only to our finest biographers and critics but to our greatest imaginative writers as well. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and James Joyce have all written of the man—as enigma, ancestor, or phantom. In Shakespeare Anthony Burgess, whose Nothing Like the Sun Harold Bloom called "the only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare," takes up that daunting challenge once again, reimagining the actual world of Shakespeare the author, actor, and man.Burgess is ever-mindful of the few facts we have about Shakespeare, and handles them with great dexterity. But this is not a mere recounting of facts. It is an attempt by one virtuoso writer to capture the likeness of the supreme virtuoso, to locate him exactly and take his measure. It is also an attempt to present him—as only a gifted professional writer can—as a working writer among others, a man of his time in his own milieu.
Shakespeare the Elizabethan upstart? The literary genius without peer? The representative man? The actor among actors, businessman among businessmen? What Burgess so skillfully gets across—alongside what he calls "the main facts about the life and society from which the poems and plays arose"—is a genuine feel for who Shakespeare was and where he was. In the end, Burgess claims for himself the right of every Shakespeare-lover: "to paint his own portrait of the man."
Synopsis
Even readers who have a good grasp of Shakespeare will find this biography a surprise and delight.
The Atlantic Monthly
"Animated by affection and an understanding of the creative imagination that only a creative writer can bring to bear."
Editorials
Terry Eagleton
"A bright, racy, intelligent text...knowledgeable and humorous."—Commonweal
The Atlantic Monthly
"Animated by affection and an understanding of the creative imagination that only a creative writer can bring to bear."—
The Daily Telegraph
"Burgess's wonderfully well-stocked mind and essentially wayward spirits are just right for summoning up an apparition of the Bard."Library Journal
Burgess used Shakespeare as a character in his 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun but turned a more critical eye to the bard's life in this 1970 outing. The book is at once the story of Shakespeare the writer as well as the Elizabethan stage and the times in which he lived and worked. Burgess's obvious ardor for Shakespeare shines through in this short but worthy biography. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Book Details
Published
July 1, 2006
Publisher
Barnes & Noble
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780760776094