Shakespeare: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd
List Price:
Our Price: $9.00
You Save: $23.50 (72%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.93 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Peter AckroydEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-25
ISBN: 0385511396
Number of pages: 592
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Book Reviews of Shakespeare: The Biography
Book Review: A Marvel of Inferential Biography
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful recreation of Shakespeare's time and place. As an evocation of England, it is much superior to Ackroyd's overly diffuse _Albion: Origins of the English Imagination_.
Ackroyd's Shakespeare is an actor and poet first and a storyteller second, if at all. Ackroyd cautions us to view theater as the Elizabethans did, as a highly-stylized and rhetoric-festooned spectacle, and not as we do now, as an attempt to create a naturalistic world in miniature. Ackroyd also does a great job of portraying Shakespeare as he must have seemed to his contemporaries. He was all the rage for a while, undeniably talented, a fast worker, but also a frequent borrower from other writers, even using verbatim passages from sources for his history plays. In this he was not unique to his contemporaries, just moreso. The magnitude of his achievement would not become fully apparent for another three-quarters of a century.
Shakespeare here is very much the Unseen Seer, able to take on all guises and never disclose his own true self. Since all we really have are the plays and a few legal documents, the temptation to infer Shakespeare's personality out of his writings is strong. Ackroyd handles this pitfall-dotted terrain masterfully, the reader never feels that the author is climbing on rainbows.
A neat surprise in the oft-parsed biographical material Ackroyd assembles is the record of a lawsuit in which Shakespeare was called as a witness. Ackroyd points out that this is the only surviving transcript of Shakespeare's actual spoken words. Perhaps typically, he is noncomittal in his testimony.
The latter fourth of the book is only slightly less fascinating, as the plays are finished and the biographical trail winds through miscellaneous legal materials and contemporary allusions. But the whole work is great. Ackroyd makes a great tie-in with the end of Shakespeare's life and the lines of his last play:
Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let's go off
And bear us like the time.
Authors Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Authors Books
Bloomsbury Recalledby Quentin Bell
Columbia University Press; Published: 1997-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.40
Price in other shops:
William Tyndale: A Biographyby David Daniell
Yale University Press; Published: 1994-11-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $62.92
Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish Americaby Kathleen Ann Myers
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2003-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.00
Price in other shops:
Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics)by Ernst Jünger
Penguin Classics; Published: 2004-05-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.00
Price in other shops:
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Lifeby C.S. Lewis
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1995-11-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.22
Price in other shops:
Roughing It (The Penguin American Library)by Mark Twain
Penguin Classics; Published: 1981-12-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.65
Price in other shops:
Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98by George Dawson, Richard Glaubman
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2001-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.49
Price in other shops:
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)by Bill Bryson
Harper Perennial; Published: 2008-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
The Professor and the Madman CDby Simon Winchester
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-10-04; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $8.46
Price in other shops:
Alexander Hamilton: A Lifeby Willard Sterne Randall
Harper; Published: 2003-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.80
Price in other shops:
Similar books summaries and other product reviews
Becoming JaneRelease date: 2011-04-05; DVD
Best price: $2.80
Price in other shops:
The Confessions (Penguin Classics)by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Penguin Classics; Published: 1953-08-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.93
Price in other shops:
London: The Biographyby Peter Ackroyd
Nan A. Talese; Published: 2001-10-16; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $73.99
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchensby Christopher Hitchens
Twelve; Published: 2011-09-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.97
Price in other shops:
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeareby Stephen Greenblatt
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 2004-09-17; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $9.49
Price in other shops:
Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeareby Jonathan Bate
Random House; Published: 2009-04-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.64
Price in other shops:
Shakespeare (The Illustrated and Updated Edition)by Bill Bryson
Harper; Published: 2009-11-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.81
Price in other shops:
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeareby Stephen Greenblatt
W. W. Norton; Published: 2005-09-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.80
Price in other shops: