Series
Volume 6
Shakespeare &
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Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives
Edited by Paul Franssen and Paul Edmondson
110 pages, index
ISBN 978-1-78920-687-6 $120.00/£89.00 / Hb / Published (April 2020)
ISBN 978-1-78920-688-3 $24.95/£19.95 / Pb / Published (April 2020)
eISBN 978-1-78920-689-0 eBook
Reviews
“This is a lively and wide-ranging collection that is sure to please the scholarly as well as the general reader, tempted by contemporary imaginings of a four-hundred-year-old bard.” • Modern Language Review
Description
New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare’s biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children’s fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.
Paul Franssen has taught British at the English Department of Utrecht University since 1979, where he obtained his PhD in 1987. He has published numerous articles on English literature, mainly of the early-modern period, and edits Folio, the journal of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries. He co-edited The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (Fairleigh Dickinson U. P, 1999), Shakespeare and European Politics (University of Delaware Press, 2008), and Shakespeare and War (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008).
Paul Edmondson is Head of Research and Knowledge and Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is co-series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s Shakespeare Handbooks, and co-supervisory editor of the Penguin Shakespeare. His publications include: Twelfth Night: A Guide to the Text and Its Theatrical Life (Palgrave, 2005), with Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2004) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy (Cambridge, 2013), and, with Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival (Bloomsbury, 2013).