Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Book Note: Shakespeare and London

Salkeld, Duncan. Shakespeare and London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

I'd just like to call your attention to this fascinating scholarly work on Shakespeare and London (note: not Shakespeare's London or Shakespeare in London). I just finished reading it, and I learned an enormous amount from it. Shakespeare in London relates biographical details of Shakespeare's life, but it connects those to the biographies of others who doubtless surrounded him in London. It also tries to find as many connections between London events or personages and Shakespeare's plays.

I'm providing a few pages of the introduction to give you a feel for the book.





The book then moves on to chapters entitled "Stratford to London," "Places," "People," "Art / Authority," and "Diversity" before bringing the subject to its conclusion.

I highly recommend the book as an endlessly intriguing examination of Shakespeare in London and London in Shakespeare.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).



Bonus! A nifty map of London included in the book:


Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest