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OverviewOne 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 DetailsAuthor: Eric SamsPublisher: Yale University Press Imprint: Yale University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 15.60cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 23.50cm Weight: 0.426kg ISBN: 9780300072822ISBN 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 ![]() 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."ReviewsAuthor InformationEric 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. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |