Lois Potter - The life of William Shakespeare: a critical biography

Lois Potter's book provides a delightful guide through Shakespeare's world. A splendid introduction for those new to the facts about Shakespeare's life, it is also a revelation for anyone all too familiar with them. The Life of William Shakespeare revitalizes old truths by asking questions where none seemed necessary, by filling in new detail, and, most of all, by approaching the material from the perspective of a would-be, then practicing and collaborating, player-playwright. Potter's unique emphasis on Shakespeare's imaginative life and the words that fed it works brilliantly to produce what I would have thought impossible: a really new biography that never thins into mere speculation. Learned, modest, witty, and above all smart, the book will be a must-read for anyone who cares about early modern theater.

Meredith Skura, Professor of English,
Rice University

By keeping her eye on the enduring power of Shakespeare's writing, Lois Potter manages to gather all the interesting and puzzling questions we have asked about his life into a focused and authentically critical biography. She is adventurous in taking on speculation and counter-speculation but never allows us to confuse conjecture with fact. Richly informative and engagingly written, this book should appeal to general readers as well as to professional Shakespeareans.

Edward Pechter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus,
Concordia University

Lois Potter has produced an astonishing, revelatory, fully literary biography. The Life of William Shakespeare is a product of deep reservoirs of historical knowledge, theatrical experience, and critical acumen, all deployed with an extraordinarily sympathetic imagination. Potter adjudicates standing quarrels about the life story with intelligence and dispassion, offers up scintillating new readings of the works, and produces interesting and original observations on every page.

Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director,
Shakespeare Association of America, and
Professor of English, Georgetown University

This is not just (just!) a biography of Shakespeare: it is a theatrical biography. It uses Lois Potter's immense, unrivalled knowledge of things theatrical to draw very logical and frequently original inferences.

Laurie E. Maguire, Professor of English,
University of Oxford

This is a lively, fresh new introduction to the life of Shakespeare, no mere regurgitating of earlier lives. It reads well. It is judicious, intelligent, coherent, and well documented.

David Bevington, Distinguished Professor Emeritus,
University of Chicago

Blackwell Critical Biographies

General Editor : Claude Rawson

This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European, and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous point-making, but through the practical persuasion of volumes which offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context.

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The Life of Samuel Johnson
Robert DeMaria, Jr

The Life of Robert Browning
Clyde De L. Ryals

The Life of William Faulkner
Richard Gray

The Life of Walter Scott
John Sutherland

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rosemary Ashton

The Life of Thomas Hardy
Paul Turner

The Life of Celine
Nicholas Hewitt

The Life of Henry Fielding
Ronald Paulson

The Life of W. B. Yeats
Terence Brown

The Life of Evelyn Waugh
Douglas Lane Patey

The Life of Goethe
John R. Williams

The Life of John Milton
Barbara Lewalski

The Life of Daniel Defoe
John Richetti

The Life of William Shakespeare
Lois Potter

The Life of George Eliot
Nancy Henry

This edition first published 2012
2012 Lois Potter

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Potter, Lois.

The life of William Shakespeare : a critical biography / Lois Potter.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-20784-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-118-28152-9 (pbk.)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. 2. Dramatists, EnglishEarly modern, 1500-1700Biography. I. Title.

PR2894.P68 2012

822.33dc23

2011043348

List of Illustrations

Elizabethan-Jacobean Stratford-upon-Avon

New Place, the Guild Chapel, and the grammar school in Stratford

Elizabethan-Jacobean London: locations associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Portrait of the Earl of Southampton

Portrait of Richard Burbage

The Shakespeare coat of arms

Title page of The Spanish Tragedy

Portrait of Ben Jonson

Will Kemp as depicted in his pamphlet The Nine Days' Wonder

Title page of Robert Armin's The Two Maids of Moreclacke

Title page of the appendix to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr

Page from the manuscript of Sir Thomas More

Portrait of George Chapman

Portrait of John Lowin

Title page of the 1608 Quarto of King Lear

Portrait of Thomas Middleton

Title page of George Wilkins' The Painful Adventures of Pericles

Portrait of John Fletcher

The frontispiece to the First Folio (1623)

Portrait of Sir John Suckling

Images of Shakespeare and his characters, c .1820

A nineteenth-century composite of Shakespeare portraits

The Chandos portrait

The Cobbe portrait