Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life. To Kuzner, Shakespeare’s skepticism doesn’t have the enabling potential of Keats’s heroic “negativity capability,” but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare’s works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world. The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare’s plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.

Shakespeare has always been a big part of the author's life. This is the story of how he has stumbled, shambled and occasionally glided through the years with Shakespeare as his guide. It also shows us what Shakespeare's rough-and-ready genius can teach us about love, war, sex, death, drunkenness, friendship.

This volume presents a study of the changing images and differing ways that the life of English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been interpreted throughout history. The author takes readers on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, bringing the story right up to 1989. He reconstructs as much of the elusive author's life as possible, considering his family history, his economic standing, and his reputation with his peers; the Shakespeare who emerges may not always be the familiar one.

Describes Shakespeare's experiences in London and his retirement to the country in a fictional account that includes excerpts from his works.

The works of Shakespeare have become staples of literature. They are everywhere, from our early schooling to the lecture rooms of academia, from classic theatre to modern adaptations on stage and screen. But how well do we really know his plays? In this witty, iconoclastic book, the bestselling author Fintan O'Toole examines four of Shakespeare's most enduring tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. He shows how their tragic heroes have been over-simplified and moulded to fit restrictive, conservative values, and restores the true heart and spirit of the classics. 'I've never read a book like this before: it's challenging, irreverent and funny.' Roddy Doyle

From the star-crossed romance of Romeo and Juliet to Othello's misguided murder of Desdemona to the betrayal of King Lear by his daughters, family life is central to Shakespeare's dramas. This book helps students learn about family life in Shakespeare's England and in his plays. The book begins with an overview of the roots of Renaissance family life in the classical era and Middle Ages. This is followed by an extended consideration of family life in Elizabethan England. The book then explores how Shakespeare treats family life in his plays. Later chapters then examine how productions of his plays have treated scenes related to family life, and how scholars and critics have responded to family life in his works. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources. The volume begins with a look at the classical and medieval background of family life in the Early Modern era. This is followed by a sustained discussion of family life in Shakespeare's world. The book then examines issues related to family life across a broad range of Shakespeare's works. Later chapters then examine how productions of the plays have treated scenes concerning family life, and how scholars and critics have commented on family life in Shakespeare's writings. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research. Students of literature will value this book for its illumination of critical scenes in Shakespeare's works, while students in social studies and history courses will appreciate its use of Shakespeare to explore daily life in the Elizabethan age.

Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figures. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, 'Shakespeare the Player' should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.