Shakespeare: His Life, Work, and Era

by Dennis Kay

This new biography looks beyond the established facts of Shakespeare's life and traces how the events of his era affected the way he lived, thought and wrote. Shakespeare emerged as a survivor, never completely alienating either his political masters or his audience. Discussion of the plays, poems and sonnets is interwoven with relevant moments in both Shakespeare's life and his age: the financial ruin of his father; his marriage to an older woman; the ravages of the plague on both his family and theatre audiences; the pressure of royal patronage; the Essex rebellion and the final family disgrace just before his death.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, History

446 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be the single most understandable book on the life and work and era of Shakespeare that has been written to date. It totally lived up to the hype on the back of the jacket. Expecting another lame attempt at getting to the heart of Shakespeare's quest for immortality as an Elizabethan/Jacobean playwright, poet and man about the stage, I was pleasantly surprised at the absence of the kind of crooked assessments by other biographers who make Shakespeare into something he wasn't, such as a devout Catholic, or another person entirely who masked his identity with some secret motives for authorship. The mysterious Shakespeare, as some call him, is no longer a mystery, after reading this 409 page offering, which is highly entertaining for those who have at least some interest in Shaksper besides attending one of his plays. Just the knowledge that the family name was probably changed from the odious Shakeshaft is worth the price of admission. But there are many more revelations that are made here. I am now forced to begin pruning my collection of Shakespeare studies from my library. They no longer hold much water, but resemble sands slipping from one's fingertips, as a Poe poem has expressed the emotion. The man is best seen in his settings, and what strange settings are here for us to partake in. Wonderful scholarship and use of language. But as Shakespeare was a complex writer, the telling of the tale is also hard to grasp unless one makes a concerted effort. This is probably not a good introduction to Shakespeare, but an acquired taste from other experiences. The weak brained will have problems with the attention required of this portrait, if they go about it loosely and expect to skim breezingly through the pages in a mere hour or two. It requires a long and honest effort by all to grasp the directions in which the life, work and era of Shakespeare's achievement as the greatest growth of the English language evolved and flowered due to one man's contributions. The circumstances are all right here, including a vast knowledge of other writers and actors on the stage of the period. You simply have to breath it all in to experience the high spirits that are the rewards of having made the plunge. This is the kind of book you may want to take periodic breaks from reading, to meditate on, to digest, what you have already read before going further with the rich tellings of a story that is more than myth, romance, tragedy, or comedy, but all of the above.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in December 1999.

As yet another biography of Shakespeare, a book needs to have something different about it to fight its way through all the others. Apart from his eminence which means that there is much competition, his life also suffers from a scarcity of hard facts as opposed to legends. Kay's particular slant is to aim to place the plays and poems in the context of the life and the times. It is almost more a work of literary criticism than a biography, if unfashionably centred on the author rather than the reader. He has little to say about the life that isn't well known, his descriptions of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and theatrical history are more interesting, but it is his summaries of the themes and circumstances of the plays themselves that are the finest parts of the book. Each play gets about four pages, little enough space to describe them; but Kay is able to illuminatingly set out the themes which show Shakespeare's concerns and development as a writer. He is unfailingly orthodox, keen to avoid the strange obsessive flights of the imagination that characterise many writers on Shakespeare, most obviously (recently) Ted Hughes. He does not want to use the writings to illuminate the life, a dangerous but common practice, but vice versa.

The book has a terrible index (but even that is more than Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being). Every play is given space in the book, but some are not listed at all in the index.