William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...

A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser. In this memoir, Fraser recounts the life she shared with the renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and an insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother...

Presents a brief profile of the life and works of sixteenth-century playwright, William Shakespeare; and contains black-and-white illustrations that include a diagram of the Globe Theater.

Presents the life and work of the English playwright William Shakespeare and provides information about the theater of sixteenth-century London.

This volume is a biography on English poet and playwright, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. In this work, the author attempts to provide a vivid and plausible version of the undocumented areas of Shakespeare's life. The author intends to demonstrate how an acutely sensitive and talented boy -- surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life,...

An authoritative, modernized edition of the complete works of the great Elizabethan dramatist offers the complete texts of every comedy, tragedy, and history play, along with key facts about each work, a plot summary, major roles, sources, textual history, glossaries, and other helpful textual notes.

"A perfect match of writer and subject: one of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights--with his cooperation and access to a trove of hitherto unseen material. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary...

Discusses Shakespeare's life and times, his works, and the connections between them. Also includes new work and discoveries by scholars over the last fifty years and reexamines the famous legends about the playwright.

Writing Home is an eclectic memoir that includes work from Bennett's entire career. Here are selections from his occasional diaries, covering 1980-1990, which have appeared in The London Review of Books, the journal he kept during the production of his first play, Forty Years On, which starred John Gielgud; and accounts of the filming of his television plays. In prefaces, reviews, memorial addresses, and essays, he discusses actors and literary figures...