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William Shakespeare:
The Anatomy of an Enigma order this bookPeter Razzell Price £30.00  William Shakespeare's life, obscured by literary mythology, has remained a tantalising enigma for the past four hundred years, and the aim of this book is to reveal the mystery behind this enigma. It is a "quest for Shakespeare": unravelling a series of strands in order to understand the man and the major influences which shaped his life and writing.The key relationship in Shakespeare's life was that with his father, John Shakespeare. The thesis which forms the central core of the first section of the book is that the character of John Falstaff was directly based on Shakespeare's father - helping to explain not only significant events in John Shakespeare's life, but also critical experiences in his son's biography. This thesis helps illuminate not only the Falstaff plays - The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V - but also a number of other works, including Hamlet. The second half of the book focuses on Shakespeare's own life, and includes much new and original research, particularly on the tradition that Shakespeare was a poacher of deer. Dr Razzell has discovered new evidence which confirms the details of this tradition, and links this with a discussion of the effects of the poaching incident on Shakespeare's subsequent life and writings. In addition to documentary and literary material, a sociological approach has been used which illuminates a number of areas, including the question of Shakespeare's origins. He has previously been thought of as coming from a narrow provincial background, which has been one of the difficulties in accepting his author ship of the plays. Recent research has shown that John Shakespeare was not merely a Stratford artisan, but was a trader operating on a large scale, buying and speculating in a variety of commodities (including the lending of money), and operating over a wide geographical area, including London. This type of trading activity was associated with a distinctive way of life, with its own cultural values. These traders were highly cosmopolitan, living and working not only in a provincial world, but also in a sophisticated metropolitan setting. This helps to explain how Shakespeare came to acquire the cultural knowledge which enabled him to write plays of such universal appeal. This conclusion has been reached through the analysis of detailed economic and social historical evidence, a method which has been applied to a number of other topics, leading to a series of original and novel conclusions. This book will be of interest not only to students of literature, biography, history, sociology and psychology, but also to the general reader with an interest in Shakespeare. Peter Razzell holds a Bachelor of Social Science from Birmingham University and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. For a number of years he was a lecturer in sociology at the University of London, and now works as a publisher in London. He is the author of The Conquest Of Smallpox and Edward Jenner's Cowpox Vaccine, as well as a number of articles on demographic and social history. He edited Henry Mayhew's Morning Chronicle Survey and Richard Gough's The History Of Myddle, and has written on Weber's Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism, published in the British Journal Of Sociology. |