William Shakespeare: A Popular Life (Applause Books) - Softcover

O'Connor, Garry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557834652 ISBN 13: 9781557834652

Publisher: Applause, 2001

Synopsis

(Applause Books). Garry O'Connor's biography creates a vivd impression of Shakespeare's family life, his marriage and sexuality, the intimate details of his background, and his relationships with the theatre, his audiences and the towering political figures of his time such as Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. It captures the darkness and confusion of his religious feelings, and his painful search for identity as well as his continuous commitments to change and development. O'Connor imaginatively and persuasively reconstructs the playwright's life and career.

About this title

About the Author:

Garry O Connor has worked as daily theatre critic for the Financial Times, and as a director for the RSC, before becoming a fulltime writer. As novelist, biographer and playwright Garry has published many books on actors, literary figures, religious and political leaders including Peggy Ashcroft, Pope John Paul II and the Blairs. He has had plays performed at Edinburgh, Oxford, Ipswich, London and on Radio 4, and contributed dramatized documentaries to Radio 3, scripts and interviews for BBC 1, as well as having his work adapted for a three-part mini-series.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rather than taking on the Sisyphean task of sifting through the reams of documents generated by zealous scholars, British biographer O'Connor has chosen "to give Shakespeare a life, not only as a historical figure who can be brought to life, but the dimension of one who is still living." This strategy, for him, entails two major departures from typical Bardology (such as Park Honan's bio earlier this year): First, O'Connor freely and assuredly speculates on the contents of Shakespeare's mind ("Fugitive Jesuits in disguise popped in and out of his imagination as vividly as images of woman's delight"; the Bard later finds that "twins are exhausting"). Second, he draws upon the thoughtful opinions of those who have worked closely with the plays in performance and in noncritical writings: Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn, among others. Their smartly chosen quips have a refreshing authority. O'Connor's approach to the plays themselves ranges from irreverently colloquial (Prospero's Epilogue is "the old man signing off") to casually shrewd--a digression on "the textual use of musical sounds and instruments" is as good as any of the academic research he eschews. While his hostility to the vicissitudes of contemporary scholarship is understandable, O'Connor's reliance on an 80-year-old book for a chronology of "facts and traditions" at the end surely weakens the chronology's credibility; many discoveries have since been made. As an idiosyncratic overview of Shakespeare's present-day status among admirers outside the Ivory Tower, the book's a gem, but its speculative aspects remain ungrounded. (Jan.)

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Applause
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1557834652
• ISBN 13: 9781557834652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 388