The Facts About Shakespeare

The purpose of this volume has been to summarize what we know about Shakespeare. The documentary records and early traditions of his life have been supplemented by information i...

In the time of Shakespeare, the fashion of writing lives of men of letters had not yet arisen. The art of biography could hardly be said to be even in its infancy, for the most...

Shakespeare's lifetime was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama. By the date of his birth Europe was witnessing the passing of the rel...

The main difficulties that stand in the way of determining the actual form in which Shakespeare left his plays are due, first, to the total absence of manuscripts, and, secondly...

The value of a knowledge of the order in which an author's works were composed no longer needs to be argued. The development of power and skill which such knowledge reveals is a...

During Shakespeare's lifetime, his plays were mentioned and imitated as often as those of any of his contemporaries. The more important documents bearing on his growing reputati...

Considerable matter in the following volumes from the Clarendon Press bears on the early criticism of Shakespeare: Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, 2 vols.; Seven...

Shakespeare lived in a period of change. In religion, politics, literature, and commerce, in the habits of daily living, in the world of ideas, his lifetime witnessed continual...

In 1576, James Burbage, father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, and himself a member of the Earl of Leicester's company, built the first London playhouse, the Theater in Sho...

Owing to the conditions of publication described in Chapter VII there are questions as to the authenticity of a number of the poems and plays ascribed to Shakespeare. Of the poe...

Andrew's nonsense in _Twelfth Night_, II. iii. 23. Many of the Sonnets contain reminiscences of the French sonneteers of the sixteenth century, and it is thought that in some ca...

Such fragments of Latin as we find in the dialogue between Holofernes and Nathaniel in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii, and V. i, are probably due to some elementary phrase-book...

The Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. W. Aldis Wright. 9 vols. 1863-1866. 2d ed., 1891-1893. The text known as the Cambridge text is very near to that of the Globe ed., and these have...

Convenient collections, often with valuable introductions and notes, are: Dodsley's Old English Plays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 15 vols., 1874-1876; Manly's Pre-Shaksperean Drama, 2 v...

We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than "The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in which Ben Jonson stated that the poe...

None of the books here listed gives a comprehensive account of the theater. Greg's admirable edition of Henslowe's Diary, Fleay's researches, and Murray's supplements to them ar...

A good bibliography for the critical matter on these plays is to be found in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v, pp. 442-444. As to Cardenio, connected with Dou...

The first thorough attempt to determine the chronology of Shakespeare's plays was made in Malone's "Attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare w...

The preceding are the most important books, but the following are useful in various ways: William Shakespeare. K. Elze. Halle, 1876. Eng. trans, by L. D. Schmitz, 1888. A Chroni...

The Shakespeare Classics, gen. ed. L. Gollancz (in progress, 1907-), reprints the chief sources of the plays: Lodge's Rosalynde, Greene's Pandosto, Brooke's Romeo and Juliet, th...

See bibliographies in the Cambridge Modern History, vol. iii, chap. x, and the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v, chap. xiv. The two most accessible and important...