Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485
10 best books like Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 (John Julius Norwich): Shakespeare After All, The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London, The Conquering Family, Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story, Shakespeare's Language, Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide, Shakespeare, The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama
| Author | Marjorie Garber |
| ISBN | 0385722141 |
A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country's foremost authorities on his life and work. Drawing on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years, Marjorie...
| Author | Benjamin Woolley |
| ISBN | 0805065091 |
A fascinating portrait of one of the most brilliant, complex, and colorful figures of the Renaissance.
Although his accomplishments were substantial -- he became a trusted confidante to Queen Elizabeth I, inspired the formation of the British Empire, and plotted voyages to the New World-John...
| Author | Liza Picard |
| ISBN | 0312325665 |
This picture of the London of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) is the result of Liza Picard's curiosity about the practical details of daily life that almost every history book ignores. As seen in her two previous, highly acclaimed books-Restoration London and Dr. Johnson's London-she has immersed herself...
Thomas B. Costain's four-volume history of the Plantagenets begins with THE CONQUERING FAMILY and the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, closing with the reign of John in 1216.The troubled period after the Norman Conquest, when the foundations of government were hammered out between...
| Author | Stanley Wells |
| ISBN | 0375424946 |
From one of our most distinguished Shakespeare scholars, here is a fascinating, lively, anecdotal work of forensic biography that firmly places Shakespeare within the hectic, exhilarating world in which he lived and wrote.
Theater in Shakespeare's day was a burgeoning “growth industry."...
| Author | Frank Kermode |
| ISBN | 0374527741 |
A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The Bard
The true biography of Shakespeare--and the only one we need to care about--is in his plays. Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's...
| Author | John Barton |
| ISBN | 0385720858 |
Now in its first American edition, Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright.
Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and...
| Author | Michael Wood |
| ISBN | 0465092659 |
In this absorbing historical detective story, acclaimed broadcaster and historian Michael Wood takes an entirely fresh approach to the Bard's life, vividly re-creating the turbulent times through which he lived and painting a more convincing and complete portrait of the artist than has ever before...
| Author | Paul Collins |
| ISBN | 1596911956 |
The first popular narrative history of Shakespeare's First Folio, the world's most obsessively pursued book.
One book above all others has transfixed connoisseurs for four centuries—a book sold for shillings in the streets of London, whisked to Manhattan for millions, and stored deep...
| Author | Peter Saccio |
| ISBN | 0195123190 |
Far more than any professional historian, Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about English medieval history. Anyone who appreciates the dramatic action of Shakespeare's history plays but is confused by much of the historical detail will welcome this guide to the...
| Author | A.D. Nuttall |
| ISBN | 0300119283 |
A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity...
| Author | Jack Lynch |
| ISBN | 0802715664 |
Becoming Shakespeare begins where most Shakespeare stories end—with his death in 1616—and relates the fascinating story of his unlikely transformation from provincial playwright to universal Bard. Unlike later literary giants, Shakespeare created no stir when he died. Though he'd once...
| Author | Colin McGinn |
| ISBN | 0060856157 |
Shakespeare's plays are usually studied by literary scholars and historians and the books about him from those perspectives are legion. It is most unusual for a trained philosopher to give us his insight, as Colin McGinn does here, into six of Shakespeare's greatest plays—A Midsummer Night's Dream,...
| Author | Helen Waddell |
| ISBN | 0486414361 |
This is that strangeness, without which beauty is not made perfect.
This is the wonky cousin of The White Goddess from Robert Graves. Rampant rolls of verse citation seep and suggest all the anxious influence of the ancients, particularly the Irish, who survived the initial pillage from the...
| Author | Ron Rosenbaum |
| ISBN | 0375503390 |
“[Ron Rosenbaum] is one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.”
–David Remnick
In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum gives readers an unforgettable way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination. As he did in his groundbreaking Explaining Hitler,...
Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor
| Author | David Abulafia |
| ISBN | 0195080408 |
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, has, since his death in 1250, enjoyed a reputation as one of the most remarkable monarchs in the history of Europe. His wide cultural tastes, his apparent tolerance of Jews and Muslims, his defiance of the papacy, and...
| Author | Frances Stonor Saunders |
| ISBN | 0060777303 |
A vibrant history of Italy in the cataclysmic fourteenth century as seen through the life of a brilliant military strategist and bandit lord
At the dawn of the Renaissance, hordes of mercenaries swooped down on the opulent city-states of Italy and commenced to drain them dry. The greatest...
| Author | Michael Prestwich |
| ISBN | 0300071574 |
Edward I—one of the outstanding monarchs of the English Middle Ages—pioneered legal and parliamentary change in England, conquered Wales, and came close to conquering Scotland. A major player in European diplomacy and war, he acted as peacemaker during the 1280s but became involved in a bitter...
| Author | Jonathan Bate |
| ISBN | 1400062063 |
“One man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s...
| Author | Jamieson Webster |
| ISBN | 0307907627 |
The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the ghost haunts Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane. Arguably, no literary work is more familiar to us. Everyone knows at least six words from Hamlet, and most people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange,”...
| Author | Charles Derek Ross |
| ISBN | 0520045890 |
Examines how Richard came to power in 15th-century Britain & attempts to reconcile his ruthless political actions with his beneficent rule.
Fortunes of a younger son, 1452-1471
Gloucester, Clarence & the court, 1471-1483
The heir of Nevill: Richard duke of Gloucester &...
| Author | Desmond Seward |
| ISBN | 0140234020 |
During the fifteenth century, England was split in a bloody conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster over who should claim the crown. The civil wars consumed the whole nation in a series of battles that eventually saw the Tudor dynasty take power. The much admired historian Desmond Seward tells...
| Author | Wilfred Lewis Warren |
| ISBN | 0520036433 |
King John is a study not only of a king and his political misfortunes, but also of a period—a period of profound changes in society at large, and hence one of unprecedented stressed. John's personality, so distorted by chronicles such as Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, is investigated through...
| Author | Christopher Lee |
| ISBN | 0312321392 |
1603 was the year that Queen Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, died. Her cousin, Robert Carey, immediately rode like a demon to Scotland to take the news to James VI. The cataclysmic time of the Stuarts had come and the son of Mary Queen of Scots left Edinburgh for London to claim his throne as James I of...
