Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
10 best books like Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Harold Bloom): Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, Shakespeare After All, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Shakespeare: The Biography, Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story, Shakespearean Tragedy, The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard, The Age of Shakespeare, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1, Shakespeare
| Author | James Shapiro |
| ISBN | 1416541624 |
For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this remarkable...
| 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 | Stephen Greenblatt |
| ISBN | 0393352609 |
A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an...
Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd...
| 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."...
"A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.
Approaching...
| Author | Norrie Epstein |
| ISBN | 0140138862 |
I had just finished Epstein’s The Friendly Dickens and enjoyed it very much. After reading that book I thought ‘Shakespeare too, well, why not?’ I’m glad I did.
In this book Epstein takes a look at the person, plays and history of Shakespeare. She then stirs in wonderful interviews,...
| Author | Frank Kermode |
| ISBN | 0679642447 |
In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on...
| Author | Harold Clarke Goddard |
| ISBN | 0226300412 |
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.
Shakespeare Downheartedness:"The Meaning of Shakespeare" by Harold C. Goddard (2 volumes)
"Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.”
In "The Meaning...
| 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 | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0517268256 |
Highly respected and widely read author Isaac Asimov offers a fresh, easy-to-read approach to understanding the greatest writer of all time.
Designed to provide the modern reader with a working knowledge of topics pertinent to Shakespeare's audience, this book explores, scene-by-scene,...
| Author | Charles Nicholl |
| ISBN | 0670018503 |
A brilliantly drawn detective story with entirely new insights into Shakespeare's life
In 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a court case at Westminster and it is the only occasion on which his actual spoken words were recorded. The case seems routine a dispute over an unpaid marriage...
| 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 | Northrop Frye |
| ISBN | 0300042086 |
One of the greatest literary critics of our time here provides a remarkable introduction to the genius of William Shakespeare through a study of ten of Shakespeare’s most popular plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, King Lear,...
Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion
| Author | David Crystal |
| ISBN | 0140291172 |
A vital resource for scholars, students and actors, this book contains glosses and quotes for over 14,000 words that could be misunderstood by or are unknown to a modern audience. Displayed panels look at such areas of Shakespeare's language as greetings, swear-words and terms of address. Plot summaries...
| Author | Eric Partridge |
| ISBN | 0415254000 |
This classic of Shakespeare scholarship begins with a masterly introductory essay analysing and exemplifying the various categories of sexual and non-sexual bawdy expressions and allusions in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The main body of the work consists of an alphabetical glossary of all...
| Author | Park Honan |
| ISBN | 0192825275 |
In the last ten years, virtually every previously known fact about Shakespeare has been modified by new research. Park Honan draws on this new information to dramatically alter our perceptions of the actor, poet, and playwright.
Here is virtually all that can be factually known or reasonably...
| 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 Vendler |
| ISBN | 0674637127 |
Helen Vendler, widely regarded as an accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as a guide to some of the best-known poems in the English language.
In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler interprets imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing...
| 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,...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0374529272 |
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
| Author | Jonathan Bate |
| ISBN | 0330371010 |
This fascinating book by one of Britain's most acclaimed young Shakespeare scholars explores the extraordinary staying-power of Shakespeare's work.
Bate opens by taking up questions of authorship, asking, for example, Who was Shakespeare, based on the little documentary evidence we...
