Second Best Bed PDF Download

Author: Tim Kelly
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822210054
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 20

View

Book Description

Author: Avril Rowlands
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0957608608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 61

View

Book Description
When Shakespeare died, he famously left his wife Anne only one thing - the second best bed. This superb one-woman play, full of both humour and pathos, has received great critical acclaim since its premier at the Swan Theatre Worcester in 2012. The wake has finished, the mourners have all gone home, leaving Anne to remember her life with the most talented playwright the world has ever seen. Or was he? Did he write the plays? His widow would know if anybody did. Wouldn't she?

Author: Vern Thiessen
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group - Playwrights Canada Press
ISBN: 9780887547690
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Same as the old version (same cover, copy and reviews), except it has some revised text.

Author: Carol Ann Duffy
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 057119995X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

View

Book Description
Mrs Midas, Queen Kong, Mrs Lazarus, the Kray sisters, and a huge cast of others startle with their wit, imagination, lyrical intuition and incisiveness.

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1613100418
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 70

View

Book Description
ÊIs Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject. Ê The original publication spans only 150 pages, and the formatting leaves roughly half of each page blank. The spine is thread bound. It was published in April 1909 by Harper & Brothers, twelve months before Mark Twain's death. Ê The book attracted controversy for incorporating a chapter from The Shakespeare Problem Restated by George Greenwood without permission or proper credit, an oversight Twain blamed on the accidental omission of a footnote by the printer. Ê The book has been described as "one of his least well received and most misunderstood works". Although she admits that Twain appears to have been sincere in his beliefs concerning Shakespeare, Karen Lystra argues that the essay reveals satirical intentions that went beyond the ShakespeareÑBacon controversy of the time. Ê Though it is commonly assumed to be nothing more than a stale and embarrassing rehash of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, Twain was up to something more than flimsy literary criticism. He was using the debate over Shakespeare's real identity to satirize prejudice, intolerance, and self-importanceÑin himself as well as others.... But after his passionate diatribe against the "Stratfordolators" and his vigorous support of the Baconians, he cheerfully admits that both sides are built on inference. Leaving no doubt about his satirical intent, Twain then gleefully subverts his entire argument. After seeming to be a serious, even angry, combatant, he denies that he intended to convince anyone that Shakespeare was not the real author of his works. "It would grieve me to know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me," he writes mockingly. "Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly seventy-four years?" We get our beliefs at second hand, he explains, "we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are made." Twain has set a trapÑan elaborate joke at the expense of what he scornfully refers to as the "Reasoning Race." He is satirizing the need to win an argument when it is virtually impossible to convince anyone to change sides in almost any debate. His excessive rhetoric of attack is obviously absurdÑcalling the other side "thugs," for exampleÑyet it has been taken at face value.

Author: Lena Cowen Orlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192846302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 447

View

Book Description
Tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables

Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441

View

Book Description
Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135891885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421

View

Book Description
The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture. Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

Author: Carolyn Meyer
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780152062217
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

View

Book Description
In Stratford-upon-Avon in the sixteenth century, Anne Hathaway suffers her stepmother's cruelty and yearns for love and escape, finally finding it in the arms of a boy she has grown up with, William Shakespeare.

Author: Germaine Greer
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408821540
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 525

View

Book Description
______________ 'Excellent ... a marvellous imagining of the life of Shakespeare's wife and a devastating exposure of the misogyny of the male biographers who have disparaged her' - Sunday Telegraph 'Greer dares to think the unthinkable ... this is a bold and imaginative book' – Independent 'A spirited, voluble, scholarly book which gives some depth and some dignity to the marginalised Mrs Shakespeare' - Guardian ______________ AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4'S BOOK OF THE WEEK Little is known of the wife of England's greatest playwright. In play after play Shakespeare presents the finding of a worthy wife as a triumphant denouement, yet scholars persist in believing that his own wife was resented and even hated by him. Here Germaine Greer strives to re-embed the story of their marriage in its social context and presents new hypotheses about the life of the farmer's daughter who married our greatest poet. This is a daring, insightful book that asks new questions, opens new fields of investigation and research, and rights the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare. 'A refreshing corrective to the usual portrait ... Greer is impressive when it comes to detailing their Stratford life and times ... It's robust, lively stuff' - The Times