The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Shakespeare [Paperback]

In the same winning formula as The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie (more than 300,000 copies sold) and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes (1999), this all-new companion to Shakespeare will present The Bard in a new and exciting way in a new century. For students, scholars, theater lovers, and scholars - nearly everyone! - this book wraps some 400 years of Bardology into a lively and often unexpected package.In their witty and inimitable way, Dick Riley and Pam McAllister examine the whole dramatic canon, play by play, including dramas of disputed authorship. (The long poems and sonnets are also covered.) Included are inside stories on theater and film productions, alternate interpretations of the plays, Shakespeare's status around the world, the clubs and societies, the mysterious life - and even the question that has plagued critics almost from the day he put down his quill: whether Shakespeare even wrote the works attributed to him.

-The Glover's Boy from Stratford: The Unremarkable Life of William Shakespeare-Renaissance England: The Cult of Elizabeth-The ups and downs of Everyday Life in Shakespeare's London-When Gooseturd Green Was All the Rage: Elizabethan Fashions-Maps of Shakespeare's England and London -Fools, Clowns, and Jesters-All the World's a Stage: The Wooden O of the Elizabethan Theater-The Elizabethan Oscars-Ten Words Any Shakespeare Reader Needs to Know-Was Shakespeare Really Shakespeare? -Bardolatry and Its Enemies: The History of the Shakespearean Industry -The First Folio - and What Isn't in It-The Shakespearean Moons of Uranus-Women in Elizabeth's England-The Music Ho! Renaissance Rhythms, Highbrow and Low-The Creativity of the Shakespearean Insult-The Fair Youth, a Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady: The Sonnets as Soap Opera-Great Lines He Didn't Write- Our Two Hours' Traffic on the Stage - The Big Personalities-So Near and Yet so Far: The Language of the Plays-Artists and the Barl3´