Shakespeare (Magill’s Literary Annual 2000)
At a glance:
- Author: Park Honan
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1564-1616
- Setting: Stratford-upon-Avon and London, England
- Principal Characters: William Shakespeare, John Shakespeare, Mary Arden Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway, Richard Burbage, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Henry Wriothesley, Queen Elizabeth i, King James i
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Authors or writers, Literature, Poetry or poets, England or English people, Seventeenth century, London, Sixteenth century, Sheep, Shakespeare, William, or Shakespearean plays
- Locales: London, England, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Every biography is a palimpsest, written over the biographies that preceded it, and in turn to be covered by the texts that succeed it. Honan’s life of Shakespeare rests above a series of lives dating back at least to Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1662). Fuller could not discover the date of Shakespeare’ s death, but he began the unending process of eking out limited information with mythology. Fuller’s brief account of the playwright tells of “the wit combats betwixt [Shakespeare] and Ben Johnson [sic],” a pleasant but unverifiable anecdote....
[The entire page is 2129 words long]
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