Home Romances: Introduction by Tony Tanner by William Shakespeare; Introduction by Tony Tanner (ISBN: 9780679454878)

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Romances: Introduction by Tony Tanner Hardcover - 1997

Name: Romances (Everyman&#39;s Library)
Price: 33.59 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Shakespeare, William; Tanner, Tony [Introduction]
ISBN: 9780679454878

by William Shakespeare; Introduction by Tony Tanner

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From the rear cover

James was writing as a late nineteenth-century novelist. Not so very many years before this, in the 1870s, another Victorian, Edward Dowden, was the first to designate Shakespeare's Last Plays as 'Romances'. By then the word had acquired a lot of semantically blurred luggage since the time it simply meant a tale in a vernacular Romantic language--'Isn't it romantic?' is not the sort of question worth going into here. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans used the word of stories but not of dramas. Shakespeare never used the word at all--not of plays, not of anything.

Details

Title Romances: Introduction by Tony Tanner
Author William Shakespeare; Introduction by Tony Tanner
Binding Hardcover
Edition Reprint
Pages 656
Volumes 1
Language ENG
Publisher Everyman's Library, NY
Date April 7, 1997
Features Bibliography
ISBN 9780679454878 / 067945487X
Weight 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg)
Dimensions 8.39 x 5.47 x 1.44 in (21.31 x 13.89 x 3.66 cm)
Themes
- Cultural Region: British
Library of Congress subjects Tragicomedy
Library of Congress Catalog Number 97216357
Dewey Decimal Code 822.33

About the author

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King's New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later under James I, called the King' s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain's Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare's plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.