The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Shakespeare

by Dick Riley, Pam McAllister

Overview

In the same winning formula as The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie (more than 300,000 copies sold) and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes (1999), this all-new companion to Shakespeare will present The Bard in a new and exciting way in a new century. For students, scholars, theater lovers, and scholars - nearly everyone! - this book wraps some 400 years of Bardology into a lively and often unexpected package.In their witty and inimitable way, Dick Riley and Pam McAllister examine the whole dramatic canon, play by play, including dramas of disputed authorship. (The long poems and sonnets are also covered.) Included are inside stories on theater and film productions, "alternate" interpretations of the plays, Shakespeare's status around the world, the clubs and societies, the mysterious life - and even the question that has plagued critics almost from the day he put down his quill: whether Shakespeare even wrote the works attributed to him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826412508
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/01/2001
Series:	Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companions
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Dick Riley's novels and plays include collaboration on the best-selling Black Sunday (with Thomas Harris), Rite of Expiation, and the drama Middleman Out. He lives in White Plains, New York. Pam McAllister is the author of ten books, including three others in Continuum's Bedside, Bathtub &Armchair Companion series which she co-authored with Dick Riley, on Shakespeare (2001), Sherlock Holmes (1999), and Agatha Christie (1979). Her other books include Death Defying: Dismantling the Execution Machinery in 21st Century U.S.A. (Continuum, 2003) about ending capital punishment and two books about women's use of nonviolent action for social justice. In 1982, she edited the groundbreaking anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (New Society Publishers), which the Village Voice called "one of the most important books you'll ever read." She currently writes a column for The Progressive Christian magazine.

Table of Contents

- The Glover's Boy from Stratford: The Unremarkable Life of William Shakespeare- Renaissance England: The Cult of Elizabeth- The ups and downs of Everyday Life in Shakespeare's London- When "Gooseturd Green" Was All the Rage: Elizabethan Fashions- Maps of Shakespeare's England and London - Fools, Clowns, and Jesters- All the World's a Stage: The Wooden "O" of the Elizabethan Theater- The Elizabethan Oscars- Ten Words Any Shakespeare Reader Needs to Know- Was Shakespeare Really Shakespeare? - Bardolatry and Its Enemies: The History of the "Shakespearean Industry"- The First Folio - and What Isn't in It- The Shakespearean Moons of Uranus- Women in Elizabeth's England- The Music Ho! Renaissance Rhythms, Highbrow and Low- The Creativity of the Shakespearean Insult- The Fair Youth, a Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady: The Sonnets as Soap Opera- Great Lines He Didn't Write- "Our Two Hours' Traffic on the Stage" - The Big Personalities- So Near and Yet so Far: The Language of the Plays- Artists and the Bard: Paintings of His Plays and Life- The Secret of Psalm 46- "Sad Stories of the Deaths of Kings" - The English History Plays- The Ten Best Movies of Shakespeare's Plays- Summer Camps and Shakespearean Festivals- Shakespeare in the Garden

Editorial Reviews

"Through careful, thoughtful, and objective illumination of the work, the man, the time period, and the people and places that inhabit the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare, as well as the world inhabited by Shakespeare himself, Riley and McAllister have compiled, perhaps, the most concise, yet all-encompassing book on the Bard to date. The greatest appeal here lies in the humorous, literate, sometimes irreverent, and always knowledgeable interpretation and synopsis of the entire dramatic canon, presented play by play .From an objective look at the authorship problem to Elizabethan holidays to a brief discourse on fools (Shakespearean and otherwise), The Bedside Companion is nothing if not thorough .Any reader will walk away from this book with an accessibility to the Bard's writings that very few works can offer .The authors have tailored a book to explicate the work and life of the greatest writer of the English language and to please two distinct audiences?the playgoer and the literary scholar?at the same time. This would seem to be a fool's venture, yet, as Shakespeare's plays have taught us, the fool is often endowed with more wisdom than the wisest of men."
Foreword Magazine

"[A] clever and informative book .If you love Shakespeare, you'll love The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Shakespeare."
WTBF-FM, April 23, 2002

"A lot of good material divided into small portions and attractively displayed, like light snacks to be nibbled at random, a few at a time, as an undemanding yet satisfying supplement to whatever else one may be doing in the bed, bath, or armchair... Readers will find good grazing among a wealth of related subjects that liberally intersperse the entries on the plays... the book's authors... should be commended for the range of material they have assimilated and presented with considerable skill and accuracy. And a sense of humor." Kansas City Star, November 4, 2001

"The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Shakespeare is, as its title suggests, appropriate casual reading just about anywhere in the house, for it is an informative and delightful compendium to the poems and plays. The authors also offer interesting and sometimes arcane observations about Shakespeare's life, his theater, and the impact of his writing today. And at the end of their book, the authors even present an eady-to-use, Chinese-menu style chart for learning to scold like an expert at Elizabethan name-calling; one can come away from the pleasures here and flyte like a master!"
Gerald M. Pinciss, Hunter College * the Graduate Center

"With an engaging blend of homage and irreverence, this book renders accessible the Bard's entire oeuvre."
Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

This browser provides synopses of plays, information about the period in which each play is set, possible plot sources, and notable features and productions of 36 of Shakespeare's plays (Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen are not included). Interspersed with chapters on each play are short discussions about topics such as Shakespeare's sonnets, authorship problems, women's roles in 15th- and 16th-century society, and Shakespeare's language. The text is enriched with illustrations, but no references or additional readings are provided. Riley and McAllister also collaborated in The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes. All the information here can be found in other general Shakespeare resources. Shakespeare for Dummies (LJ 7/99), for example, presents the same information with more humor and includes more extensive information about the sonnets and Shakespeare's language for a better price. An alternate purchase for public libraries where there is a need for a brief introduction to the Shakespeare canon. Shana C. Fair, Zanesville Campus Lib., Ohio Univ. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal