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Neither the popular Richard the Second nor the First Part of Henry the Fourth were published again during Elizabeth's lifetime. Even two antifeminist works that could be read as critical of the unmarried Elizabeth - The Book Against Women and The Fifteen Joys of Marriage - were tossed into the flames. able-bodied Elizabethan men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, all of whom were potential conscripts. Shapiro goes into Shakespeare’s new uncharted territory as to just how far he might assuage the populace with vibrant new thoughts regarding their position relative to rich courtiers and other patrons of the court.
Este ponto de vista deriva, em parte, de "ele não era de uma época, mas de todos os tempos", de Ben Jonson, uma ideia também ecoada nas obras de Matthew Arnold. Visitors were encouraged to extend the bar and view the portrait hrough a small hole or "O" cut in the plate: to their surprise, "the ugly face changed into a well-formed one. As for the other three plays, anyone who reads them seriously should find profitable what Shapiro has to say about them and how they represented the breaking of new ground, both for Shakespeare and for English theater. As he conducts us through the pretensions of the Baconians, the Marlovians, the Oxfordians, and on through the latest internet conspiracy theories, larded with pompous quasi-legal language about "reasonable doubt" and "prima facie case", Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts, about the actors of Shakespeare's company, about Elizabethan printers and their methods, about what Shakespeare's manuscripts reveal about how his plays and stagecraft worked.
Whitehall figured strongly enough in Shakespeare's imagination to make a cameo appearance in his late play Henry the Eighth .
The Elizabethan theater had replaced some of the lost fabric of Catholic life, the liturgical underpinnings of communal life prior to the Reformation, and the Queen followed a leery course of not arousing one side or the other—Catholic or Protestant—which Shakespeare played up to in one play after another, always inscrutable, not advocating for one side or the other. A fascinating and entirely believable portrait of a talented workaholic … Shapiro’s informed enthusiasm and energetic prose is addictive.
He has written several award-winning books, including Shakespeare in a Divided America, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Take a popular play and a run of just a fortnight and around 15 per cent of London's adult population would have seen it. Piece by piece, Mr Shapiro builds the case— the contemporary witnesses, the tracks left by printing houses and theatrical practice, the thousand details that show, apart from anything else, how unnecessary the whole farrago has been. Shapiro will have none of this and, bringing us down to earth with a bump, his ambition is to understand, as Greenblatt put it, 'how Shakespeare became Shakespeare' by placing him in a world of plague, conspiracy and invasion. Shakespeare's great historical epics from this period Henry V and Julius Caesar reflect this mood of national trepidation.
Much more satisfying than a book of history which covers a longer period but can only skim the surface of things. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books, among other places. It housed the greatest collection of international art in the realm, its "spacious rooms" hung "with Persian looms," its treasures "fetched from the richest cities of proud Spain" and beyond. A far richer, more intimate portrait of our greatest author than you’re likely to find in any cradle-to-grave biography. Excerpted from A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro Copyright © 2006 by James Shapiro.And then Shapiro shows how these public concerns were reflected in the plays that Shakespeare wrote that year.
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