Shakespeare: The Biography

Передня обкладинка
Chatto & Windus, 2005 - 546 стор.
Peter Ackroyd's method is to position Shakespeare in the close context of his world. In this way, Ackroyd not only richly conjures up the texture of Shakespeare's life, but also imparts an amazing amount of vivid, interesting material about place, period and background. The book is packed with gems - and the reader turns the pages eagerly, keen to absorb the next nugget of information. Some snippets: Shakespeare was secretly a Roman Catholic; he wrote many more plays but these have been lost; the witches in Macbeth were not hags but women fairies or nymphs played by boys; the 'best' bed was for guests which was why he bequeathed his wife his 'second best' bed (the matrimonial bed in which he probably died); 'ham acting' derives from the strutting walk which showed off the ham-strings; an actor called 'Will' played female parts - could it have been Shakespeare himself?; and the strongest bond in the plays is between father and daughter perhaps reflecting Shakespeare's own family life.

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Dost thou loue pictures?
9
A witty mother witlesse else her sonne
27
This prettie Lad will proue our Countries blisse
43
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Про автора (2005)

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He graduated from Cambridge University and was a Fellow at Yale (1971-1973). A critically acclaimed and versatile writer, Ackroyd began his career while at Yale, publishing two volumes of poetry. He continued writing poetry until he began delving into historical fiction with The Great Fire of London (1982). A constant theme in Ackroyd's work is the blending of past, present, and future, often paralleling the two in his biographies and novels. Much of Ackroyd's work explores the lives of celebrated authors such as Dickens, Milton, Eliot, Blake, and More. Ackroyd's approach is unusual, injecting imagined material into traditional biographies. In The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), his work takes on an autobiographical form in his account of Wilde's final years. He was widely praised for his believable imitation of Wilde's style. He was awarded the British Whitbread Award for biography in 1984 of T.S. Eliot, and the Whitbread Award for fiction in 1985 for his novel Hawksmoor. Ackroyd currently lives in London and publishes one or two books a year. He still considers poetry to be his first love, seeing his novels as an extension of earlier poetic work.

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