In modern life we are all too familiar with ideas of image and celebrity. This highly original study investigates the early evolution of Shakespeare's public ‘image', or reputation, as a man, an actor and a poet, both from his own viewpoint and from that of his contemporaries.
Katherine Duncan-Jones is an internationally respected Shakespeare scholar, author of the critically acclaimed biography Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life, editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and co-editor of the Arden Shakespeare's Poems. She is a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford
‘Katherine Duncan-Jones...has given much energy and expertise over
the years to showing that it was the other, less lyrical,
shrewd-headed Shakespeare we glimpse in county archives and
Chancery documents who secured the success and eventual apotheosis
of ‘Gentle Shakespeare,' the poet commemorated by a fine folio
edition of his works in 1623. Duncan-Jones' Shakespeare is
Shakespeare the survivor, the tradesman's son with no university
credentials and no connections in high places...This new book is
valuable for its revaluation of previous material (from Ungentle
Shakespeare) its greater conciseness and its updated
research...(which) allows Duncan-Jones to drawn the line she sees
in Shakespeare's life more sharply... ...Her writing is immersed in
close textual detail, yet there is still a strong, overriding sense
of Shakespeare's presence in his various milieus...(Duncan-Jones
has) an astute touch.'
*John Stubbs, Literary Review*
‘Shakespeare, in this analysis, is characterised as someone who had
to assert his own position amid a fiercely hierarchical
society...Duncan-Jones demonstrates that Shakespearean
self-promotion was as much literary as social.'
*Peter J Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement*
This learned, readable and often entertaining book informs,
challenges and stimulates in equal measure.
*English Studies*
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