Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Studies in the Life and Environment of Shakespeare Since 1900
- Shakespeare’s Deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy Suit
- Shakespeare’s Reading
- Recent Studies in Shakespeare’s Chronology
- Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607
- The Shakespeare Collection in the British Museum
- The Structural Pattern of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
- The ‘Meaning’ of Measure for Measure
- Hamlet and the Player Who Could NOT Keep Counsel
- Unworthy Scaffolds: A Theory for the Reconstruction of Elizabethan Playhouses
- Shakespeare in the German Open-Air Theatre
- Othello in Paris and Brussels
- Shakespeare and Denmark: 1900–1949
- International News
- A Stratford Production: Henry VIII
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life and Times
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Studies in the Life and Environment of Shakespeare Since 1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Studies in the Life and Environment of Shakespeare Since 1900
- Shakespeare’s Deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy Suit
- Shakespeare’s Reading
- Recent Studies in Shakespeare’s Chronology
- Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607
- The Shakespeare Collection in the British Museum
- The Structural Pattern of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
- The ‘Meaning’ of Measure for Measure
- Hamlet and the Player Who Could NOT Keep Counsel
- Unworthy Scaffolds: A Theory for the Reconstruction of Elizabethan Playhouses
- Shakespeare in the German Open-Air Theatre
- Othello in Paris and Brussels
- Shakespeare and Denmark: 1900–1949
- International News
- A Stratford Production: Henry VIII
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life and Times
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
It would be instructive to relate the history of Shakespearian biography to that of biography in general, from its beginnings in Ben Jonson’s Conversations or the prefatory verses of the First Folio, on to the first formal Life prefaced by Rowe to his edition of 1709, and so to the foundations of modern documented study in Malone’s Life and History of the Stage in their latest form in the Variorum of 1821. Certain main trends of development are plainly observable.
The collection of oral evidence or of tradition is superseded by the collection of facts resting upon documents, and the man Shakespeare is recorded in the setting of the London theatre world with which in his life he was mostly concerned. From the history of the stage it was a short step to the study of the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare lived, in London or in Stratford-upon-Avon, to complete the setting for the picture of his life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1950