Shakespeare and Biography [Paperback]

Shakespeare and Biographyis not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, Rene Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sorts of issues these biographers have found especially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life. How has Shakespeare's contemplation of these issues changed and grown, and in what ways do those changes reflect new cultural developments in our world as it continues to reinterpret Shakespeare?

1. The Biographical Problem
2. The Art of Biography
3. Sex
4. Politics
5. Religion
6. Out of the Depths
7. On the Heights
8. L'envoi
Further Reading
Bibliography

[A] learned book. --Biography

The book will be very healpful to students...as a needed guide to the rapidly growing number of biographies of Shakespeare in print.... --R. A. Foakes, Comparative Drama

David Bevingtonis the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent books includeThe Seven Ages of Human Experience(Blackwell Publishing, 2005), co-authored with Anne Marie Welsh and Michael L. Greenwald,Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen(Pearson Longman, 2006),This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare's Plays in Production, Then and Now(University of Chicago Press, 2007) andShakespeare's Ideas(Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He is the senior el/