The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594

Author:   Eric Sams
Publisher:   Yale University Press
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9780300072822


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   20 October 1997
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594


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Overview

One of the central assumptions of established Shakespeare scholarship has been that the playwright produced flawless work needing no revision-that if a text was inferior in style, it could be assumed that Shakespeare did not write it. Thus Shakespeare had nothing to do with the ""bad"" quartos; these were instead the work of ""memorial reconstruction,"" in which actors remembered and subsequently wrote down entire texts composed by others. In this controversial book, Eric Sams suggests that there is no evidence to substantiate memorial reconstruction, that Shakespeare very probably revised his plays repeatedly, and that he may therefore be the author of the ""bad"" quartos and of other works not attributed to him. Drawing on testimony from Shakespeare's contemporaries and on documents concerning his family, Sams presents a vivid biographical picture of the first thirty years of the playwright's life. He establishes that Shakespeare's origins were humble: his parents were illiterate Catholics and the family trade was farming and animal husbandry. During this period Shakespeare acquired some knowledge of legal practice, served as the legal hand in an attorney's office, married, and moved to London to join a theatre company and to establish a career as an actor and playwright. Sams traces the impact of Shakespeare's upbringing in the plays themselves-not only those of the Folio edition but others, including the ""bad"" quartos. He finds that these texts are filled with figurative language that would have been gleaned from a rural upbringing and legal experience. Using detailed textual analysis, he argues compellingly that during these early ""lost"" years, Shakespeare was in fact writing first versions of his later great works.

Full Product Details

Author:   Eric Sams
Publisher:   Yale University Press
Imprint:   Yale University Press
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.426kg
ISBN:  

9780300072822


ISBN 10:   0300072821
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   20 October 1997
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

"Part 1 The country background: reading and writing; the family home and trades; religion, school and Latin; the early theatre; poverty; butchery and by-products; John Shakespeare's Catholic testament; Lancashire; the law clerk; Lucy and his deer; marriage and departure; theatre, work and company; the battle of the books; wits and their butts - Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Lodge, Peele, Lyly. Appendices: allies - Harvey and Spenser; the Parnassus plays; Willobie his avisa; the sonnets; the actor-playwright of the 1590s. Part 2 Style - the noted weed: Ur Hamlet; Hamlet 1603; the taming of a shrew; the troublesome reign; contention and true tragedy; faire em and locrine; man's wit and the dialogue of dives; early start and revision; ""Bad Quartos"" and ""Memorial Reconstruction by Actors""; ""Source Plays"", ""Derivative Plays"" and plagiarism; dating and ""Collaboration""; ""Stylometry""; handwriting; documents."

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Author Information

Eric Sams has published over one hundred articles, essays, and reviews on the subject of dating and identifying Shakespeare's plays and is the editor of Shakespeare's Edmund Ironside, which he identified as Shakespeare's lost play. He is also a musicologist and world authority on lieder.

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