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Author: Simon Palfrey
Genres: Serious Non-Fiction
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..
“One of the great Shakespeare scholars of our age”
- Julia Lupton, American Scholar of William Shakespeare and renaissance literature (University of California, Irvine; Guggenheim Fellow)“A miracle, an instant classic”
- Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and cultural theorist on Macbeth, Macbeth (2016)
Author: Simon Palfrey
Genres: Serious Non-Fiction
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..
“One of the great Shakespeare scholars of our age”
- Julia Lupton, American Scholar of William Shakespeare and renaissance literature (University of California, Irvine; Guggenheim Fellow)“A miracle, an instant classic”
- Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and cultural theorist on Macbeth, Macbeth (2016)