Shakespeare: The Biography - Paperback

by Peter Ackroyd (Author)

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape-the industry, the animals, even the flowers-that would appear in Shakespeare's plays. He takes us through Shakespeare's London neighborhood and the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.

Front Jacket

With his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd has long been recognized as today's foremost practitioner of the literary biography. His adroit style and unrivaled ability to uncover the telling detail have made those books both critical and commercial successes. And now, in SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement.
Thousands of books have been written about the playwright, but none has borne Ackroyd's unique and accessible stamp. His method is to position Shakespeare in the context of his world, exploring everything from Stratford's humble town to its fields of wildflowers; discerning influences on the plays from unexpected quarters; and entering London with the playwright as modern theater, as we know it, is just beginning to emerge.
We are with Shakespeare, observing him and his circle of friends, patrons, managers, and fellow actors and writers. It is as if Ackroyd were sitting with the Elizabethan audience as the plays are performed.
Because the author is coming from so intimate a perspective, he is able to see Shakespeare's genius from within, so we feel that Ackroyd the writer merges with Shakespeare the writer, the poet, the man; and thus with great sympathy and clarity we experience the way in which Shakespeare worked.
SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY is unlike the works other writers-excellent academics-have written, which merely analyze and describe. Rather, Peter Ackroyd has used his skill, his extraordinary knowledge, and his historical intuition to craft this major full-scale book on one of the most towering figures of the Englishlanguage.

Author Biography

PETER ACKROYD is the bestselling writer of both fiction and nonfiction, most notably the definitive history of London, London, The Biography. His most recent books include The Lambs of London and J.M.W. Turner, the second biography in the Ackroyd Brief Lives series. He has also written full-scale biographies of Dickens, Blake, and Thomas More and the novels The Clerkenwell Tales, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, Milton in America, and The Plato Papers. He has won the Whitbread Award for Biography, the Royal Society of Literature Award under the William Heinemann Bequest (jointly), the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Award for Literature, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and The Guardian fiction prize. He lives in London.