Books like Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt

Bill Bryson uncovers the real William Shakespeare by tracing early modern scholarship, debunking myths, and showcasing the playwright’s linguistic genius—revealing the man behind the legendary words.

This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton’s brief and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick White Told with precision and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton’s public career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr. Sloane to his career-making Loot, Orton’s plays often shocked, sometimes outraged, and always captivated audiences with their dark yet farcical cynicism. A rising star and undeniable talent, Orton left much undone when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who had educated Orton and also dreamed of becoming a famous writer. Prick Up Your Ears was the basis for the distinguished 1987 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett, and starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave. A brilliant, page-turning examination of the dueling forces behind Orton’s work, Prick Up Your Ears secured the playwright’s reputation as a great twentieth-century artist.

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

The first part of this work is an evocative biographical sketch, scotching many myths and fleshing out the meagre facts into a rounded portrait of the man. Wells then turns his attention to the plays themselves and, finally, he discusses Shakespeare's critical legacy both here and abroad.

Chronicles the life of poetic dramatist Christopher Marlowe, discussing how he challenged English society with his writings, what influence his work had on the literary world, how his life was impacted by the political and social atmosphere of his time, and other related topics.

An account of Shakespeare's life and times based on contemporary documents, none dated later than 1635.

"One man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages."In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard's own immortal list of a man's seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare's life and connects them to his world and work as never before.Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth's St. Crispin's Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I's passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew.Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare's experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.From the Hardcover edition.

"Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution - as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.

A comprehensive history of Shakespearean theater from 1574 to 1642, including the acting companies, playhouses, and staging techniques.

Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, a UC Santa Cruz grad student, takes a risky job delivering a giant psychedelic mushroom, while 18‑year‑old William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon learns about a sacred Roman relic. Two timelines collide amid drug law woes and historical upheaval.

A focused portrait of Shakespeare’s 1599 season, when he worked on the Globe Theatre and penned Hamlet, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Henry V amidst England’s political and cultural upheavals.

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was the most brilliant dramatist of Victorian England. A daring and cynical playwright, the forerunner of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, he was also a prolific journalist and humorous poet (his Bab Ballads are still widely read), and he achieved worldwide fame through his long collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, a collaboration that created such classics as H. M. S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and all the other Savoy operas. Now the story of this remarkable writer's life - and of his stormy relationship with Sullivan - is here chronicled by a renowned authority on Gilbert and on the theatrical and literary scene in Victorian London. For this biography, Jane W. Stedman has returned to original sources, has interviewed survivors, and has scoured a whole variety of Victorian periodicals for reviews, and personal comment. Gilbert emerges as a much more complex and interesting figure than has previously been thought. The book is a worthy companion piece to Arthur Jacobs's recent biography Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician.

A concise, readable but scholarly account of the life of Shakespeare.

Anthony Burgess’s novel brings the life of William Shakespeare to vivid life, weaving biography and fiction to portray the playwright as a working writer, actor, and businessman of Elizabethan England.

In 1593 Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging‑house; this account unravels the political intrigue, espionage and scandal that surrounded his murder.