OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Biography is not a new biography of Shakespeare. Instead, it is a study of what biographers have said about Shakespeare, from the first formal biography in the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe to Stephen Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate, Germaine Greer, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Park Honan, Rene Weis, and others who have written recent biographical accounts of England's greatest writer. The emphasis is on what sort of issues these biographers have found especially interesting in relation to sex and gender, politics, religion, pessimism, misanthropy, jealousy, aging, family relationships, the end of a career, the end of life. How has Shakespeare's contemplation of these issues changed and grown, and in what ways do those changes reflect new cultural developments in our world as it continues to reinterpret Shakespeare?

About the Author
David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. He has published widely on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His recent books include The Seven Ages of Human Experience (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), co-authored with Anne Marie Welsh and Michael L. Greenwald, Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (Pearson Longman, 2006), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare's Plays in Production, Then and Now (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Shakespeare's Ideas (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). He is the senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, and of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is also senior editor of the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama , 2002.

Reviews
Bevington's Shakespeare and Biography is a learned and engaging account * Jack Lynch, Times Literary Supplement *
This is probably the best and fairest book to date on Shakespeare and biography. * Rene Weis, Around the Globe *
With references to all the biographical studies of Shakespeare from the seventeenth century onwards, Shakespeare and Biography is very rewarding and encourages readers to find our more about Shakespeare as a person with specific interest on his sexual life, religious choices, and political views. * Gul Kurtulus, The Sixteenth Century Journal *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199586479
Author David Bevington
Format Paperback
Page Count 188
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 226g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 136mm * 12mm