Here are 100 books that What Was Shakespeare Really Like? fans have personally recommended if you like
What Was Shakespeare Really Like?.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As a long-time teacher of Shakespeare’s plays who’s performed in and directed amateur productions and written spin-off plays myself, I love all aspects of William Shakespeare. Before writing my own books set in his era I did intensive research into its theatre and politics, but the more imaginative approach of novelists offers different delights. I like shedding our reverence for The Bard and looking at the man, his relationships, and what contributed to his plays beyond his sources. Rather than real or fictional biographies of Shakespeare, my list features creative stories for both pleasure and learning.
Readers will either be drawn to this book by a novelist who studied Shakespeare in depth or put off by Burgess’ language. His wordplay is quite mad at times, especially when ‘WS’—Will Shakespeare—is drunk. No contemporary novelist would likely create such a mixture of Elizabethan and modern English. Despite Burgess’ knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and works, much of the plot is fanciful. However, his daring is encouraging, his imagination freeing. I never considered writing a book where Shakespeare speaks, but Nothing Like the Sun suggests, why not? Many biographies seem fictional in their guesswork; Burgess’ vitality and imagination outshine the strictly biographical. I found his ground-breaking work inspiring, and it’s a bawdy lark for readers who persevere!
A magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life, following young Will's maturation into sex and writing. A playful romp, it is at the same time a serious look at the forces that midwife art, the effects of time and place, and the ordinariness that is found side by side with the extraordinariness of genius.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
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.
Written from an actor’s perspective, Shakespeare The Player researches acting companies in Stratford-on-Avon and England during Shakespeare’s youth and adolescence. Southwark explores the possibilities of Shakespeare spending those “Lost Years” from 1585-1592 as an apprentice with acting companies. Shakespeare The Player provides otherwise obscure information about the world of the theater during Shakespeare’s formative years as an actor and writer.
How else did Shakespeare learn the crafts of writing, playing, and directing for which Robert Greene lambasted that “upstart crow…the only Shakes-scene in a country” in 1592?
Shakespeare the Player overturns traditional images of the Bard, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as actor any more than he can be separated from his works.
I have a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University, and I have taught English for 30 years. I have studied and taught Shakespeare, Tudor drama, English linguistics, the Reformation, and various other aspects in the literary and cultural history of the 16th century. The 16th century is a time of great upheaval and the more I study it, the more I am fascinated by how pivotal this epoch is in the creation of the modern world, for better and for worse. I seek out books that chart, from grandest to most intimate, this momentous time’s transformations.
Shakespeare’s Dogis the craziest Shakespearean book I’ve ever read. Not only is the young Stratford Shakespeare’s tale told by his dog, Hooker ̶ the dog speaks a kind of faux-Shakespearean: full of Elizabethan-esque vocabulary and syntax, Anglo-Saxon bawdry, new-coined usages of common words (“the wind flummoxed”; “I knelled the truth”). Moreover, Rooke must really know his dogs. Because the dog-viewpoint (a frustrated Shakespeare “bites his toenails”) seems right on the money. The struggle of a prodigy youth and his prodigy dog to escape the tawdry, shallow, raucous banality of provincial small-town life is told with vividness, wit, and pathos.
Will Shakespeare's dog, named Hooker, reports on the young poet and playwright's tumultuous Stratford household and on his and his master's shared and growing desire to be away to London
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
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.
Tracy Chevalier writes the novels I want to write! I’ve read just about all of them and was particularly excited to discover Burning Bright.Chevalier’s depiction of London in the early 19th century is masterful, and hugely inspiring for me. Burning Brightis a coming-of-age story that centers around two children’s interactions with the great poet William Blake. I met Tracy Chevalier at the Historical Novel Society Conference in Oxford where she made my day by graciously agreeing to accept a copy of my first novel The Towers of Tuscanywhich was heavily inspired by her novels and even insisting that I sign it!
From the author of the international bestseller Girl With a Pearl Earring and At the Edge of the Orchard, comes a stirring eighteenth-century coming-of-age tale
In the waning days of eighteenth-century London, poet, artist, and printer William Blake works in obscurity as England is rocked by the shock waves of the French Revolution. Next door, the Kellaway family has just moved in, and country boy Jem Kellaway strikes up a tentative friendship with street-savvy Maggie Butterfield. As their stories intertwine with Blake's, the two children navigate the confusing and exhilarating path to adolescence, and inspire the poet to create the…
I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
Keats, beloved of English majors and ordinary readers everywhere, died at 25.
No other writer – not Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, George Eliot, Jane Austen – would be remembered today if he or she had died at that age.
W.J. Bate was a magisterial Harvard scholar. His two sympathetic biographies, of Keats, and of Samuel Johnson, both won Pulitzer prizes and are still readable and important. They breathe life into their subjects and deeply humanize them.
The life of Keats provides a unique opportunity for the study of literary greatness and of what permits or encourages its development. Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is…
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…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
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 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 researched–and the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contexts of historical drama and writing ‘history’ 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.
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 volume…
My work has always been interested in the ways in which systems can be disrupted and subverted by taking radical fresh approaches to them, even where the prevailing view is that overturning them can only lead to the dreaded chaos.
A very early effort at a blood-soaked Roman tragedy written (at least partly) by England’s poet laureate. It throws its characters into a boiling cauldron of destructive evil, devising ghastly ways of killing most of them, and features one of the Elizabethan theatre’s most uncompromising villainous monsters, the racially profiled Aaron. It is customary among Shakespeare scholars to try to disown Titus for its lurid gratuitousness, but it does contain some fine poetic writing, brief flashes of the riches to come, and an anticipation of the subtler malevolence that would come to dominate the English stage in the succeeding Jacobean era. Those inclined to celebrate chaos as a purely constructive force might profit from lingering amid Shakespeare’s horrors.
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 scholars hate discussing the “authorship question” for the same reason astronomers hate discussing whether space aliens kidnap human beings. There is no real “question.” But because guessing who wrote the plays has become such a parlor game, James Shapiro took on the challenge. His book tells the crazy history of the “authorship question” and makes irrefutably clear that yes, the fellow from Stratford really did write those plays. This should settle the issue forever—but of course it won’t.
For two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays.
Since then dozens of rival candidates - including The Earl of Oxford, Sir Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe - have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi)
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro's fascinating search for the source of this controversy…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
I apparently announced, at the age of five, that I would write books and grow roses when I grew up. I’m no gardener, but I’ve remained true to my other ambition. After producing books on women’s history, I became a biographical historian, especially attracted to the lives of people dedicated to drama. This requires exploring what lies behind the stage. We have to understand our subjects’ dreams and determination, use of dissimulation, the harsh realities of making a living, and, in the case of actors, doing so by becoming somebody else. Unravelling these layers is our challenging task. But how rewarding it can be!
These 21 pen-portraits of Shakespearian characters were designed for actors, but they are invaluable for all. This is the book I turn to before I watch any play by Shakespeare. It is the product of the author’s experiences as a lifelong inspirational teacher in Wales, lecturer to New York drama students, and consummate performer of sparkling lecture-recitals across the United States.
Published in 1970, these carefully selected characters (7 from the Histories and 7 apiece from the Comedies and Tragedies) leap from the page to amuse, shock, frighten, and enchant. Philip Burton was a firm believer in Shakespeare’s wizardry, and in these brilliant sketches, he imparts more than a little magic of his own.
