Romances: Introduction by Tony Tanner (Everyman's Library Classics Series) - Hardcover

Shakespeare, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067945487X ISBN 13: 9780679454878

Publisher: Everyman's Library USA, 1997

Synopsis

William Shakespeare's last four plays carry us across space and time--from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island--and they move as well into a wilder geography of the imagination, one dominated by the wondrous and fantastical, and by reconciliation and renewal. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are famously fraught with shipwrecks and adventures, magic and disguise, speaking statues and ethereal spirits, tragic deceptions and moving reunions, and they number among the most enduringly delightful of Shakespeare's works.

The texts of the plays, authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented here with textual notes, a bibliography, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life and times, and a substantial introduction in which acclaimed scholar Tony Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeare's oeuvre.

About this title

About the Author

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King's New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later under James I, called the King' s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain's Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare's plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.

From the Back Cover

James was writing as a late nineteenth-century novelist. Not so very many years before this, in the 1870s, another Victorian, Edward Dowden, was the first to designate Shakespeare's Last Plays as 'Romances'. By then the word had acquired a lot of semantically blurred luggage since the time it simply meant a tale in a vernacular Romantic language--'Isn't it romantic?' is not the sort of question worth going into here. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans used the word of stories but not of dramas. Shakespeare never used the word at all--not of plays, not of anything.

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library USA
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067945487X
• ISBN 13: 9780679454878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 656