WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A Concise Life

by Samuel Schoenbaum ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1977

Biographies can suffer from too much detail, but not when the subject is Shakespeare. Until Samuel Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life appeared in 1975, it seemed there was not enough evidence even to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays attributed to him or to refute any ""speculative elaboration or romantic indulgence"" about his life. Now Schoenbaum offers the text from that Life, which draws from the documents--records of lawsuits, financial transactions, civil penalties, births, marriages, deaths--to trace Shakespeare's life from his parents' home in Stratford to fame in London and back home to retirement and death. The information is not new, for the most part, but it is reliable and deflates a number off myths. Contrary to tradition, Shakespeare was born on April 21, 22, or 23, 1564, no closer date is sure; he learned scripture because the law required it and soma Latin literature because the ""Elizabethan grammar school provided"" it, and his fabled erudition had no loftier origins; and he probably never left England or ever loved an Anne besides the girl seven or eight years his senior whom he married, fathered children with, left behind when he departed for London, and with whom he retired as a famous playwright and an accomplished businessman. There are lapses in the record, of course--notably the ""lost years"" just before Shakespeare surfaced in the London theatre--but Schoenbaum fills these with cautious conjectures and binds the indisputable facts to allusions in the works to present a life of Shakespeare less mythical and more nearly complete than any other.

Pub Date: March 1, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977

Categories: NONFICTION