Here are 100 books that A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II fans have personally recommended if you like
A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II.
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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 ’truth’ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my research–including a major project on ‘Wartime Shakespeare’ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in London–explores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
Shapiro’s 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 Shakespeare’s life–1599–and 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 couldn’t 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. Shapiro’s book reflects that vital mix of rigorous historical research, insightful interpretations of literary texts, and its own acts of storytelling.
What accounts for Shakespeare’s 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 who…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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 ’truth’ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my research–including a major project on ‘Wartime Shakespeare’ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in London–explores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
This book astonished me through its careful, compelling account of how art and literature–broadly conceived–have 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 Shakespeare’s 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? Written…
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 ’truth’ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my research–including a major project on ‘Wartime Shakespeare’ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in London–explores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
Lesser’s book is a bibliographical ‘detective story’ 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 1619–most of which feature historical subjects and/or are by Shakespeare–and 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 Lesser’s 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.
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 twentieth…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
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 ’truth’ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my research–including a major project on ‘Wartime Shakespeare’ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in London–explores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
I love this book because it spotlights performance contexts and conditions–what it means to stage history during the Elizabethan period–and, through this focus, provides fresh, nuanced interpretations of the plays it considers, including some by Shakespeare and others performed by Queen Elizabeth’s Men.
It is another formative book for me, especially because it negotiates ideas and representations of ‘truth’ in historical drama. Walsh’s 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. Through…
My book is about political intrigue, violence, war, heroes and villains, libels and dreams, secret plots to overthrow governments, and murders most foul. It unfolds during a tense era of cultural upheaval and radical social change. A lifetime immersed in the works of Shakespeare helped prepare me to write it. I spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. My foreign postings placed me at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire.
Shakespeare’s magnificent history plays have been described as “a feast of Henrys and Richards.” Who were those kings in real life? This book tells their true stories, and compares those stories to what Shakespeare wrote about them. Turns out he stuck pretty close to history!
I have long been struck, as a learner of French at school and later a university professor of French, by how much English borrows from French language and culture. Imagine English without naïvetéand caprice. You might say it would lose its raison d’être…My first book was the history of a single French phrase, the je-ne-sais-quoi, which names a ‘certain something’ in people or things that we struggle to explain.Working on that phrase alerted me to the role that French words, and foreign words more generally, play in English. The books on this list helped me to explore this topic—and more besides—as I was writing Émigrés.
This is a brilliant essay in literary criticism. It traces English ambivalence towards French language and culture in the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest. It does so by delving into major literary texts—by Chaucer and Shakespeare among others—that explore that ambivalence for what it is: the symptom of a fetish. I like the way Williams writes and I find her inspiring in her desire to remain faithful to the complexity of the texts she studies and their attitudes.
What was the impact of the Norman Conquest on the culture of medieval and early modern England? Deanne Williams answers this question by contending that not only French language and literature, but the idea of Frenchness itself, produced England's literary and cultural identity. Examining a variety of English representations of, and responses to, France and 'the French' in the work of Chaucer, Caxton, Skelton, Shakespeare and others, this book shows how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the pervasive presence of French language and culture in England that was the legacy of the Norman…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’ve loved the theater ever since I first stepped on stage in a high school production of You Can’t Take It With You. I had one line and was hooked! And as for Shakespeare–I fell in love with the Bard when I was 13 and saw Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. My best friend and I spent hours reciting the lines (I still remember whole speeches). So, when I was looking for an artsy subject (I love the arts) for my third novel, I naturally turned to the theater. I have a Master of Arts in Drama from the University of Toronto and when I’m not writing, I run Art In Fiction, a website showcasing 1700+ novels inspired by the arts.
Christopher Moore’s Shakespeare-themed novels are a hoot! He takes the hallowed works of the Bard and turns them into hysterical adventures starring Pocket (King Lear’s fool), Drool, and their pet monkey Jeff. The second in a trilogy is Shakespeare for Squirrels, Moore’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s irreverent and hilarious and left me breathless with admiration for Moore’s incredibly fertile imagination.
Shakespeare meets Dashiell Hammett in this wildly entertaining murder mystery from New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore-an uproarious, hardboiled take on the Bard's most performed play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring Pocket, the hero of Fool and The Serpent of Venice, along with his sidekick, Drool, and pet monkey, Jeff.
Set adrift by his pirate crew, Pocket of Dog Snogging-last seen in The Serpent of Venice-washes up on the sun-bleached shores of Greece, where he hopes to dazzle the Duke with his comedic brilliance and become his trusted fool.
Long before I started my career in journalism I was a voracious reader of historical novels. I devoured epic adventure about medieval Europe and eventually got involved in European martial arts: fighting in full armour in tournaments and melees. My love of history finally won out over my day job of defence reporting and I began penning novels. The books I most enjoy are more than just battle tales, they’re about people. Good historical fiction isn’t just about the history. It needs more than volleys of arrows and swinging swords, it needs characters you care about. These books combine authenticity with passionate, compelling writing and unique characters you won’t soon forget.
Cornwell is one of the best—if not thebest—historical novelists writing today.
In Azincourt, we follow one English longbowman on an epic adventure that culminates in one of the most famous battles in history. Cornwell deftly weaves in authentic period detail without hitting you over the head with it.
Most importantly, he is a master of characterisation and rich prose who makes you truly care about the people on the page. Leavened with humor, grittiness, and an engaging romance set amidst war, I found it a compelling and moving read.
An extraordinary and dramatic depiction of the legendary battle of Agincourt from the number one historical novelist
Azincourt, fought on October 25th 1415, St Crispin's Day, is one of England's best-known battles, in part through the brilliant depiction of it in Shakespeare's Henry V, in part because it was a brilliant and unexpected English victory and in part because it was the first battle won by the use of the longbow - a weapon developed by the English which enabled them to dominate the European battlefields for the rest of the century.
Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt is a vivid, breathtaking and…
As a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and (now) a playwright, I am a staunch believer in applying the “Three Es” in all of my work in equal quantities: to entertain, to enlighten, and to educate. My passion to create stories has been ongoing throughout my life, courtesy of my love for the written word, cinema, and the theater, all of which have impacted and influenced my stories in amazing ways. My background and accolades as a writer and publisher are listed on my personal website, but it’s my life experiences and the books that I have recommended that helped me evolve as a storyteller.
Speaking as a playwright, this selection is a must. It not only contains all of the Bard’s plays, it also includes all of his beloved sonnets. His collected works not only serve as a foundation regarding dramatic structure and poetics, but his eloquence is fuel for any lover of the written word.
The Second Edition of this complete collection of Shakespeare's plays and poems features two essays on recent criticism and productions, fully updated textual notes, a photographic insert of recent productions, and two works recently attributed to Shakespeare. The authors of the essays on recent criticism and productions are Heather DuBrow, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and William Liston, Ball State University, respectively.
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
Fake news is not new. Biographies, in particular, are fraught with fallacies and fake stories. When fake news slanders individuals, reputations are ruined and lives destroyed. That’s what happened to Elizabeth Wydeville, Queen Consort to Edward IV, and mother of the two princes who disappeared during Richard III’s reign. When I discovered the slander that destroyed Queen Elizabeth’s reputation, I began a 5-year research project to set the record straight. Some fallacies are deliberate, originating in envy or power putsches. Others derive from historical laziness or incompetence. What I learned from my research has determined my choices of biographies, stories that tell previously unrevealed truths about individuals.
Schoenbaum’s massive compilation of documents from the life of William Shakespeare is the “go-to” book for anyone who wants the facts about the Bard. A large, folio-size edition, the book contains facsimiles of over 200 contemporary documents that record important moments and events in the life and career of Shakespeare. Arranged chronologically, Schoenbaum’s quite readable narrative explains the significance of each image and creates a living person from the documents that define Shakespeare, the man.
For anyone who asks the question, “Who Was Shakespeare,” Schoenbaum provides the answer. I love “just the facts.”
