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Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Described by Julia Lupton as one of “the great Shakespeare scholars of our age”, his books include Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004; 2nd ed. 2011), a TLS International Book of the Year; Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), the MRDS Book of the Year; Poor Tom: living King Lear (Chicago, 2014); Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 2014) and the novel Macbeth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2016, revised ed. Boiler House 2021, with Ewan Fernie) praised as “a miracle, an instant classic” by Slavoj Zizek. His recent work on Spenser’s Faerie Queene explores the unique kinds of life generated by poetic forms, and the opportunities this opens up for more imaginative, adventurous, and politically engaged re-creations.
Simon is also leader of the award-winning Demons Land project, a collaboration with First Nations’ artists that seeks to create a multi-voiced, multi-disciplinary epic of Australian country from both Indigenous and European perspectives.
He is now writing Shakespeare’s History of the World.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Described by Julia Lupton as one of “the great Shakespeare scholars of our age”, his books include Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004; 2nd ed. 2011), a TLS International Book of the Year; Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), the MRDS Book of the Year; Poor Tom: living King Lear (Chicago, 2014); Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 2014) and the novel Macbeth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2016, revised ed. Boiler House 2021, with Ewan Fernie) praised as “a miracle, an instant classic” by Slavoj Zizek. His recent work on Spenser’s Faerie Queene explores the unique kinds of life generated by poetic forms, and the opportunities this opens up for more imaginative, adventurous, and politically engaged re-creations.
Simon is also leader of the award-winning Demons Land project, a collaboration with First Nations’ artists that seeks to create a multi-voiced, multi-disciplinary epic of Australian country from both Indigenous and European perspectives.
He is now writing Shakespeare’s History of the World.
Author: Simon Palfrey
Genres: Serious Non-Fiction
A new chronology of Shakespeare’s plays: not based on presumed order of composition, or phases of genre, but the period of each play’s setting.
This book tells a story that has never been told before. Shakespeare’s history of the world is an epic journey from prehistoric beginnings to the conflict-torn unfinished present. We see the plays anew, curving through recorded history like jewels on a string. Placed in this sequence, the plays shimmer at new angles, revealing facets never seen before. Shakespeare was committed to this vision from the very start of his astonishing career. He is our greatest world-builder. Every play is a laboratory of possibilities, pushing at dreams, tethered by necessities.
Every play is a world: but every play is also a collision between different worlds. Each play begins somewhere stirring and charismatic – ancient Troy, war-torn Rome, Viking Denmark, an Ephesus both before and after St Paul, a barely built ancient Britain, medieval Verona, contested seaports of Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Cyprus – but it will also travel in time. Later places and ages will interpenetrate earlier ones. England is part of the story: but there are worlds elsewhere as well. The law of history is as much repetition as slow burning alteration.
We experience the troubling and exhilarating knowledge that things could be different, they could still explode, because existing is as constructed and contingent as a play..