A missing diamond, a mysterious neighbor, a link to Shakespeare—can Hero uncover the connections?

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.

This volume presents a study of the changing images and differing ways that the life of English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been interpreted throughout history. The author takes readers on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, bringing the story right up to 1989. He reconstructs as much of the elusive author's life as possible, considering his family history, his economic standing, and his reputation with his peers; the Shakespeare who emerges may not always be the familiar one.

Excerpt from The Greatest of Literary Problems: The Authorship of the Shakespeare Works; An Exposition of All Points at Issue, From Their Inception to the Present Moment God does not ordain the vilest among men to be his messen gers of peace and enlightenment to mankind - and, certainly, the men to whom our pretentious guides have introduced us were among the vilest of their kind. No wonder the world is awakening to the necessity of a higher criticism than that with which it has hitherto been cloyed, and turning to one incomparable genius, who, voicing the primal strains of the Renaissance in Tudor England, bore them on with ever swelling majesty to the close of the grand symphony which ended with his life. This great genius I hope to Show was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans. Time was when I should have dismissed this thesis with impatience, but I am hoping that my readers will weigh the evidence I adduce before condemning me as a mere theorist. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This bibliography provides easy access to the most important Shakespeare studies in the past four decades. Brief annotations, a detailed table of contents, cross-references, and a complete index make this bibliography especially useful.

Copyright is by no means the only device for asserting ownership of a work. Some writers, including playwrights in the early modern period, did not even view print copyright as the most important of their authorial rights. A rich vein of recent scholarship has examined the interaction between royal monopolies, which have been identified with later notions of intrinsic authorial ownership, and the internal copy registration practices of the English book trades. Yet this dialogue was but one part of a still more complicated conversation in early modern England, James J. Marino argues; other customs and other sets of professional demands were at least as important, most strikingly in the exercise of the performance rights of plays. In Owning William Shakespeare James Marino explores the actors' system of intellectual property as something fundamentally different from the property regimes exercised by the London printers or the royal monopolists. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other works, he demonstrates how Shakespeare's acting company asserted ownership of its plays through intense rewriting combined with progressively insistent attribution to Shakespeare. The familiar versions of these plays were created through ongoing revision in the theater, a process that did not necessarily begin with Shakespeare's original manuscript or end when he died. An ascription by the company of any play to "Shakespeare" did not imply that it was following a fixed, authorial text; rather, Marino writes, it indicates an attempt to maintain exclusive control over a set of open-ended, theatrically revised scripts. Combining theater history, textual studies, and literary theory, Owning William Shakespeare rethinks both the way Shakespeare's plays were created and the way they came to be known as his. It overturns a century of scholarship aimed at re-creating the playwright's lost manuscripts, focusing instead on the way the plays continued to live and grow onstage.