Product Description

'Enjoyable, lively … such a pleasure to read … renders the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries more than fringe entertainment’ Independent Shakespeare is one of the greatest of all English figures, considered a genius for all time. Yet as this enthralling book shows, he was at heart a man of the theatre, one among a community of artists in the teeming world of Renaissance London – from the enigmatic spy Christopher Marlowe to the self-aggrandizing Ben Jonson, from the actor Richard Burbage to the brilliant Thomas Middleton. By bringing Shakespeare’s contemporaries to life, Shakespeare & Co throws fresh new light on the man himself. ‘Warm, cheerful, generous … Wells sketches a whole gallery of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights … He brings each vividly to life, making you feel that you’ve met them personally in some Blackfriars tavern’ Simon Callow ‘It was a time and place teeming with excitement, anecdote and incident, and Wells, in this richly enjoyable work, brings it to life with a novelist’s sense of the telling detail’ Dominic Dromgoole ‘Enthralling’ Observer ‘This is one of the most sane and exciting books on Shakespeare I have read for a long time’ Scotland on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151856 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Sunday Times
A richly enjoyable work.

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
One of the most sane and exciting books on Shakespeare I have read for a long time.

About the Author
Stanley Wells has devoted most of life to teaching, editing and writing about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Honorary Governor Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, he is also Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies of the University of Birmingham. He is General Editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare and co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. His recent account of Shakespeare and his after-life, Shakespeare For All Time, was described as the best book about Shakespeare for a generation.

Customer Reviews

Accessible rather than academic, & all the better for it
"With the passing of the years Shakespeare has too often been isolated from his fellows. He is the greatest of them, but he would not have been what he is without them." -- so says Stanley Wells at the conclusion of what is a wonderfully readable look at the theatrical scene of Shakespeare's day. Concentrating on the Bard's contemporaries rather than the man himself (more than adequately covered elsewhere), Shakespeare & Co is accessible rather than academic (though by no means lightweight), and an excellent introduction to those figures who hover on the edges of Shakespeare's biography, all too undeservingly like like bit-players in somebody else's drama. Individual chapters cover the theatrical scene (how plays were put together and presented, how they fit into the political mood of the time, and so on), and a brief look at some of the well-known actors of the day, before we get to the playwrights: Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher & Francis Beaumont, and a rather short chapter on John Webster.

The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes and details about the lives of the people covered, reminding you what a Bohemian, and odd, bunch writers can be. There's the self-destructive Marlowe, an atheistical spy who declared that he had as much right to coin money as the Queen of England; Ben Jonson the tireless self-promoter convinced he was the one writing classics for the ages; the cohabiting bachelors Fletcher & Beaumont "with one wench in the house between them" -- large-as-life figures who make Shakespeare's quiet (or at least un-recorded) life seem rather tame and level-headed in comparison.

But Wells's book is as much about the works of the playwrights in question as their lives, with a particular focus on the bearing they have on Shakespeare's plays. Wells points out where the playwrights borrowed from each other, or made jokes or references to one another's works, but as things tend to centre around Shakespeare, Wells's look at the playwrights works doesn't tend to stray too far from those that touch on the Bard's.

All in all, you get the impression of a bustling and creative scene, driven by business, politics and public demand as much as artistry, and the playwrights as much jobbing writers as any Hollywood hack or pulp fictioneer. Wells occasionally points out how the writers he covers have suffered as a result of Shakespeare's success -- their works are inevitably judged as not-quite-Shakespeare, rather than being taken on their own merits, and the product of different artistic sensibilities and aims.