PETER ACKROYD is the bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction, most notably the definitive history of London, London, The Biography. His most recent books include The Lambs of London and J.M.W. Turner, the second biography in the Ackroyd Brief Lives series. He has also written full-scale biographies of Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Clerkenwell Tales, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature Award under the William Heinemann Bequest (jointly), the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Award for Literature, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.
“Demystifies the man and the artist. . . . Expertly evokes the townscape and landscape in and around Stratford, and the corresponding mindscape that vividly merges the urban and the rustic.” –The New York Times“William Shakespeare's London comes to life with remarkable immediacy and clarity. . . . Ackroyd's research is impressive.”–San Francisco Chronicle“Ackroyd provides the sights and sounds (and smells) of Stratford and London until you'd swear Shakespeare was right at your elbow, sipping ale.”–The Philadelphia Inquirer “Captures the thrill of London and of a theater emerging, in a ‘hard and disenchanted age,’ to replace the church as the center of communal spectacle.”–The Wall Street Journal“Creates a tapestry of Elizabethan London so rich that you feel you've been there.” –Independent on Sunday
Adult/High School-Describing himself as a Shakespeare enthusiast instead of an expert, Ackroyd focuses on the bard as an extraordinarily talented theater professional rather than rhapsodizing about the intricacies of the man's genius. He interweaves Shakespeare's life story with England's dramatic history and the fascinating world of the emerging Elizabethan theater. Apocryphal stories are identified and plausible explanations for what occurred during the "missing" years are offered. Shakespeare emerges as a thoroughly engaging, almost modern man, brimming with humor, eager for social advancement, and carefully tracking the popular trends in entertainment. Students who want to discover whether Shakespeare really was the author of the famous plays will find compelling evidence that only the man from Stratford could have hidden so many ingenious clues in his work. Sixteen pages of color illustrations include portraits of Shakespeare's famous contemporaries, photographs of the interiors of Elizabethan buildings, and illustrated title pages. Those daunted by the length of this book will find it a good reference source. Students looking for information on the building of the Globe, the meanings of the sonnets, the differences in the various editions and revisions of the plays, and other typical academic questions will find useful, well-organized information. A rich, vivid account.-Kathy Tewell, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
At their best, Shakespearean biographers are like great jazz musicians, able to take a few notes of an old standard and spin them into dizzying riffs of conjecture. At their worst they reshuffle old wives' tales, piling supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards. Peter Ackroyd can riff with the best, and he brings to the task of making the old facts fresh some themes and variations of his own that deserve a hearing. He is particularly good, in fact, on the question of sound: the way the language Shakespeare wrote, his players spoke and his audiences heard differed from the Shakespeare we hear and read today. Demonstrating the courage of his convictions, he does something daring for a book aimed at a general reader: he renders all of his citations from Shakespeare "in the original." Thus a phrase from Timon of Athens is printed: "Our Poesie is as a Goume which ouses" (rather than "gum which oozes"), an effect that can defamiliarize, often in an illuminating way. An accomplished literary biographer, Ackroyd doesn't offer a new explanation of how the glover's son of provincial Stratford became the sophisticated poetic genius of London. Instead he gives us intelligent, often elegant, variations on the old ones. Like many of his fellow biographers he warns us that a particular "tradition" has no corroboration and then plays it out anyway. So with such recent, hotly debated questions as whether Shakespeare spent time in his youth in the household of subversive secret Catholics, Ackroyd spins it out for all it's worth. But the great strength of Ackroyd's book is the depth of his immersion in the culture of Shakespeare's age and the sense he gives of Shakespeare as a product of that extraordinary moment in time. His feeling for the role of the theater in Elizabethan London, "a city where dramatic spectacles became the primary means of understanding reality," seems to come from an impressively wide reading of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic contemporaries. His judgments about the work itself are sometimes ingenious, occasionally eccentric, as when he tells us, "All the evidence suggests, too, that the speech, `To be or not to be' is an interpolation," an unnecessary addition to Hamlet, possibly "from another play altogether." While location of "To be or not to be" is different in an early quarto of Hamlet, to say "All the evidence suggests" interpolation is an overstatement. Still, immersion in Ackroyd's biography cumulatively gives one a feeling that one has lived for a brief time in Shakespeare's world. Ackroyd constructs a an intricate mosaic of Elizabethan context, which brings us closer to the shadowy figure, whose most renowned character, Hamlet, tells us: "I have that within which passes show." Agent, Geri Thoma. (On sale Oct. 18) Rosenbaum is writing a book about controverises among Shakespearean scholars and directors (Random, fall 2006). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"Demystifies the man and the artist. . . . Expertly evokes the townscape and landscape in and around Stratford, and the corresponding mindscape that vividly merges the urban and the rustic." -The New York Times"William Shakespeare's London comes to life with remarkable immediacy and clarity. . . . Ackroyd's research is impressive."-San Francisco Chronicle"Ackroyd provides the sights and sounds (and smells) of Stratford and London until you'd swear Shakespeare was right at your elbow, sipping ale."-The Philadelphia Inquirer "Captures the thrill of London and of a theater emerging, in a 'hard and disenchanted age,' to replace the church as the center of communal spectacle."-The Wall Street Journal"Creates a tapestry of Elizabethan London so rich that you feel you've been there." -Independent on Sunday
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