"The history of Shakespeare in America," writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, "is also the history of America itself." Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America's literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues--revolution, s[...]
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and EnglandShakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling [...]
Going against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in early modern England, James Shapiro presents how Elizabethans imagined Jews to be utterly different from themselves----in religion, race, nationality, and even sexuality. From[...]
Presents the history of Shakespeare, following him through a single year that changed not only his fortunes, but the course of literature. In this one year, we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw, and who he worked with as he creates four of his most famous plays - "Henry V", "Julius Caesar[...]
For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates have been proposed as their true author. This title unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote[...]
For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford - have been proposed as their true author. "Contested Will" unravels the mystery of when and w[...]
For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this rema[...]
James A. Shapiro proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution, the core organizing principle of biology. Shapiro introduces crucial new molecular evidence that tests the conventional scientific view of evolution based on the neo-Darwinian synthesis, shows why this view i[...]