Shakespeare the biography by peter ackroyd publisher

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He graduated from Cambridge University and was a Fellow at Yale (1971-1973). A critically acclaimed and versatile writer, Ackroyd began his career while at Yale, publishing two volumes of poetry. He continued writing poetry until he began delving into historical fiction with The Great Fire of London (1982). A constant theme in Ackroyd's work is the blending of past, present, and future, often paralleling the two in his biographies and novels. Much of Ackroyd's work explores the lives of celebrated authors such as Dickens, Milton, Eliot, Blake, and More. Ackroyd's approach is unusual, injecting imagined material into traditional biographies. In The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), his work takes on an autobiographical form in his account of Wilde's final years. He was widely praised for his believable imitation of Wilde's style. He was awarded the British Whitbread Award for biography in 1984 of T.S. E

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Shakespeare: The Biography

October 11, 2012

At predictable intervals over the course of the last four centuries, some cynical iconoclast has suggested that William Shakespeare was a simple-minded actor from the hinterlands who was hired by an Oxford-educated aristocrat to serve as the public face for his plays. The latest incarnation of this hackneyed libel against Shakespeare is last year's box office bomb ANONYMOUS, which rather shamelessly attributes Shakespeare's canon to the Earl of Oxford. These Anti-Stratfordists are, of course, the very worst sort of intellectual elitists who indulge themselves in the most juvenile sort of contempt for history and historical method. But they almost always get noticed by the popular press and their claptrap is usually successful at muddying the waters and undermining the reputation of England's greatest literary figure.

Ackroyd, like Schoenbaum a generation ago, goes to great lengths to present the wealth of records extant from Shakespeare's

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Shakespeare: The Biography - Softcover

From the inre Flap

With his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd has long been recognized as today's foremost practitioner of the literary biography. His adroit style and unrivaled ability to uncover the telling detail have made those books both critical and commercial successes. And now, in SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement.
Thousands of books have been written about the playwright, but none has borne Ackroyd's unique and accessible stamp. His method is to position Shakespeare in the context of his world, exploring everything from Stratford's humble town to its fields of wildflowers; discerning influences on the plays from unexpected quarters; and entering London with the playwright as modern theater, as we know it, is just beginning to emerge.
We are with Shakespeare, observing him and his circle of frie