The Player's Boy: A Novel (Paris Press) - Softcover

Bryher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1930464096 ISBN 13: 9781930464094

Publisher: Paris Press, 2006

Synopsis

The orphaned James Sands anticipated a magnificent career as apprentice in an Elizabethan theater troupe. But when his masters dies unexpectedly, Sands must fight for his art, his home, and ultimately his life as the violent reign of King James I overshadows the glory and creative life of the Elizabethan era. An historical novel with profound reverberations today in the U.S., the UK, and Europe.

About this title

About the Author:

Bryher (1894-1983) wrote many critically acclaimed novels and memoirs during her lifetime. She was deeply involved in film, politics, and psychology. She funded Contact Editions, and edited Life and Letters To-day and the first English film journal, Close Up. She was the longtime companion of H.D., and a generous supporter of numerous writers, artists, psychoanalysts, and culture icons, including Marianne Moore, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company.

Patrick Gregory is an editor, translator, and the author of the novel The Dagguereotype. He is the son of poet, translator, and critic Horace Gregory and poet Marya Zaturenska, who were intimate friends with Bryher. He now lives in Northampton, MA and South Halifax, VT.

From Publishers Weekly:

An English novelist and patron of artists such as H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) first published this beautifully realized story of a young Elizabethan actor's apprentice in 1953. After the death of James Sands's beloved Master Awsten, one of the Queen's Players who has taught Sands the rudiments of acting, Sands travels from Southwark, London and passes through a succession of employers. At a house in the country, he meets the summering playwright Francis Beaumont, in the process of writing his play Philaster. James wins the part of Bellario, the girl page disguised as a boy for love of Philaster, who in a curious royal menage-a-trois sends Bellario to serve his beloved Arethusa; James duly falls in love, unrequitedly, with Beaumont's virginal fiancee, Ursula. History intrudes offstage in the form of Sir Walter Ralegh's execution and the ascent of the Puritans, and James, now a clerk, becomes a kind of poignant anachronism, too delicate for the coarsening new age. Theatrical and romantically lyrical, Bryher's novel is a forgotten gem, channeling the servant boy's first person flawlessly.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Paris Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1930464096
• ISBN 13: 9781930464094
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236