Shakespeare: A Biography

Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1963. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 352 pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Bibliography. Index. Some wear, soiling, and small edge tears to DJ. Front endpaper soiled. An account of Shakespeare's life and literary development set against the historical background of his age. Sir Peter Courtney Quennell CBE (9 March 1905 - 27 October 1993) was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. While still at school some of his poems were selected by Richard Hughes for the anthology Public School Verse, which brought him to the attention of writers such as Edith Sitwell. In 1922 he published his first book, Masques and Poems. This was followed by many other volumes, particularly his Four Portraits of 1945 (studies of Boswell, Gibbon, Sterne, and Wilkes), books on London and works on Baudelaire (1929), Byron (1934-35), Pope (1949), Ruskin (1949), Hogarth (1955), Shakespeare (1963), Proust (1971) and Samuel Johnson (1972). He first practiced journalism in London. In 1930 he taught at the University of Tokyo. In 1944-51, he was editor of The Cornhill Magazine and from 1951 to 1979 founder-editor of History Today. Quennell published two volumes of autobiography, The Marble Foot (1976) and Wanton Chase (1980). He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), and was knighted in the 1992 New Year Honours. Peter Quennell, a leading British literary critic and poet, has produced in this book an urbane, balanced study of the work and times of Shakespeare. Derived from a Kirkus review: Although the publishers' call it a biography, Peter Quennell's original working title, In Search of Shakespeare, is far more apropos. Quennell has an immense understanding of and a shrewd sympathy for his hero; the excerpts out of the poems and plays are all faultlessly chosen; and like the professional progress of Shakespeare himself, the author's commentary grows from chapter to chapter in smooth, spacious movement. Further, his conjectures on the complexities of the man (his idealism and opportunism; his irresolution between the worlds of the dour and the sweet) are all correlated to the theatrical creations themselves. A beautifully balanced book.