I am a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where I specialize in early modern drama (including Shakespeare) and book history. Since my undergraduate degree, I have been fascinated by historical drama, poetry, prose, and the often-porous boundary between âtruthâ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my researchâincluding a major project on âWartime Shakespeareâ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in Londonâexplores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
I wrote
Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre
My book examines historical plays written during Shakespeareâs time and the significance of writing, staging, and publishing historical drama duringâŚ
Shapiroâs work is often a model of the kind of writing that I would like to attempt. This book, which focuses on a single year in Shakespeareâs lifeâ1599âand its historical, political, and theatrical events (including performances of Henry V and Julius Caesar), brings its material to life.
It is a deeply researched book, with a wealth of resources listed in its bibliographical essay, but its handling and style are still so captivating and accessible that I couldnât put it down when I first read it!
When we write about early modern literature and history, we construct narratives that draw on invention and imagination. Shapiroâs book reflects that vital mix of rigorous historical research, insightful interpretations of literary texts, and its own acts of storytelling.
What accounts for Shakespeareâs transformation from talented poet and playwright to one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this gripping account, James Shapiro sets out to answer this question, "succeed[ing] where others have fallen short." (Boston Globe)
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see whoâŚ
This book astonished me through its careful, compelling account of how art and literatureâbroadly conceivedâhave an enormous impact on how we understand and access history.
By concentrating on the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and how it has been represented across the centuries, Curry reveals how much Shakespeareâs Henry V has shaped our historical awareness and cultural imagining of this event.
I am no less fascinated by the conflicting accounts and interpretations of this battle, by the difficulties and different agendas that inform acts of writing about the past, than when I first read this book, cover to cover in one sitting, as a student.
Agincourt (1415) is an exceptionally famous battle, one that has generated a huge and enduring cultural legacy in the six hundred years since it was fought. Everybody thinks they know what the battle was about. Even John Lennon, aged 12, wrote a poem and drew a picture headed 'Agincourt'.
But why and how has Agincourt come to mean so much, to so many? Why do so many people claim their ancestors served at the battle? Is the Agincourt of popular image the real Agincourt, or is our idea of the battle simply taken from Shakespeare's famous depiction of it? WrittenâŚ
This is the Inspiring true story of a young girl surviving Mengeleâs hell. This is an incisive, harrowing, and touching memoir of Eva Mozes Kor and her twin sister Miriam, who are sent to Auschwitz only to be torn from their parents and given to Josef Mengele, "The Angel ofâŚ
This volume of essays about Shakespeare and historical drama catalyzed my doctoral research and my first book. It has been, without a doubt, the single most influential book on my research and early career as an academic.
The contributions are all distinctive, engaging, and carefully researchedâand the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contexts of historical drama and writing âhistoryâ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, covering a wide range of plays and other primary texts.
It is often one of my top recommendations for students who are starting to work on historical culture. After each encounter with this book, my mind is still left brimming with ideas to explore.Â
This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.
Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volumeâŚ
Lesserâs book is a bibliographical âdetective storyâ that I found captivating and is another model of the scholarship that I would like to emulate. It concentrates on a mysterious group of ten plays printed in 1619âmost of which feature historical subjects and/or are by Shakespeareâand what we can learn about them, including why several were printed with false attributions and dates and how early readers might have encountered them.
I think Lesserâs book is an incredible achievement in handling complex, technical scholarship and an immense amount of archival research that is also so engrossing and accessible. As a reader, I felt drawn into this journey of discovery that also acknowledges the uncertainty and difficulties in making firm claims about its material.Â
Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentiethâŚ
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorâand only womanâon a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I love this book because it spotlights performance contexts and conditionsâwhat it means to stage history during the Elizabethan periodâand, through this focus, provides fresh, nuanced interpretations of the plays it considers, including some by Shakespeare and others performed by Queen Elizabethâs Men.
It is another formative book for me, especially because it negotiates ideas and representations of âtruthâ in historical drama. Walshâs book offers a compelling account of the communal construction of history and the interplay between presence and absence, which has also helped me understand my own methods as a critic and historian.
The Elizabethan history play was one of the most prevalent dramatic genres of the 1590s, and so was a major contribution to Elizabethan historical culture. The genre has been well served by critical studies that emphasize politics and ideology; however, there has been less interest in the way history is interrogated as an idea in these plays. Drawing in period-sensitive ways on the field of contemporary performance theory, this book looks at the Shakespearean history play from a fresh angle, by first analyzing the foundational work of the Queen's Men, the playing company that invented the popular history play. ThroughâŚ
My book examines historical plays written during Shakespeareâs time and the significance of writing, staging, and publishing historical drama during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that relying on Shakespeareâs histories about the lives of English monarchsâsuch as Henry Vâcan sometimes distort our understanding of the great variety of vibrant histories that were performed and printed during this time.
My book reveals that early modern publishers greatly influenced the survival and presentation of historical plays. It looks at the lives of these individuals and their communities to explore why they were interested in certain histories, how they used the past to understand the present, and how they reflected on political and religious tensions in their own time.
Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The Twenty is a journey across a rugged island of stunning beauty, little known outside Europe.
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica ââŚ
Ancient Evenings is a study of consciousness presented as a series of fictional philosophical dialogues set at the height of the Roman Empire. These dialoguesâon good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and deathâare historical re-enactments of what persons representing the major Hellenistic schools of philosophy might actually have saidâŚ
