Shakespeare: A Life in ArtShakespeare: A Life in Art brings together in a single volume Fraser's previously published two-volume biography (Young Shakespeare, 1988, and Shakespeare: The Later Years, 1992). This volume includes a new introduction, which looks back on the author's lifelong commitment to Shakespeare's work and seeks to find the pattern in his carpet.Fraser's approach places Shakespeare's work first but shows how the life and art interpenetrate, like the yolk and white of one shell. What Shakespeare was doing in Stratford and London underlies what he was writing, or more exactly, the two flow together. Most of the book is devoted to Shakespeare the man and artist, but it simultaneously throws light on his literary and personal relations with contemporaries such as Jonson, Marlowe, and others known as the University Wits. His experience as an actor and man of theater is absorbingly recounted here, as well as his relations to well-born patrons like the Earl of Southampton and Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (England's Lord Chamberlain). In 1603 when James I ascended the throne, the Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, passing under the sovereign's protection. How Shakespeare responded to his ambiguous role--he was both servant to the great and their remorseless critic--is another of Fraser's subjects. In short, Fraser's principal purpose is to advance our understanding of Shakespeare, at the same time throwing light on the work of the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. John Dryden, Shakespeare's first great critic, said that, and Fraser tries to estimate what he meant. |
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... actors. Taken together, they offer a likeness of this “sweet swan of Avon,” Jonson's phrase in his poem prefaced to the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare's plays not being true confessions, the likeness is skewed, as with those cunning ...
... actors. Taken together, they offer a likeness of this “sweet swan of Avon,” Jonson's phrase in his poem prefaced to the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare's plays not being true confessions, the likeness is skewed, as with those cunning ...
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... actor, he took after his famous brother and went up to London. Edmund died at twenty-eight. Near his grave in St. Savior's church, in London on the Thames, pious Victorians placed a recumbent effigy of Shakespeare, a mild-looking ...
... actor, he took after his famous brother and went up to London. Edmund died at twenty-eight. Near his grave in St. Savior's church, in London on the Thames, pious Victorians placed a recumbent effigy of Shakespeare, a mild-looking ...
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... actors, jacks-of-all-trades, play many people in one person. Shakespeare in the life, shuttling without ado from poetry to business, keeps one eye on a sonnet, the other on the tithes of Old Stratford. Buying tithes was his investment ...
... actors, jacks-of-all-trades, play many people in one person. Shakespeare in the life, shuttling without ado from poetry to business, keeps one eye on a sonnet, the other on the tithes of Old Stratford. Buying tithes was his investment ...
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