How did Shakespeare go from being a talented writer of comedies and histories to become one of the greatest writers of tragedies who ever lived? In this one exhilarating year we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw and who he worked with as he rebuilds the Globe theatre and writes four of his most famous plays - Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and, most remarkably, Hamlet. James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare's staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599: sending off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathering an Armada threat from Spain, gambling on a fledgeling East India Company, and waiting to see who would succeed their ageing and childless Queen. This book brings the news, intrigue and flavour of the times together with wonderful detail about how Shakespeare worked as a showman, businessman and playwright, to create an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of a fascinating and inspiring moment in history.

1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare

James-Shapiro

Biographies & Memoirs

Faber&Faber

Disco emerged from the fall-out of the Black Power Movement and an almost exclusively gay scene in a blaze of poppers, strobe lights, tight trousers, hysterical diva vocals and synthesized beats in the late sixties. Drawing on the music of Sly Stone and Parliament- Funkadelic, and the ethos of pleasure-is-politics, disco was the first musical form to explore the relationship between the machine and the body, and consequently became the progenitor of house, hip hop and techno. As such, and as a genre, disco radically redefined the sensibility of the seventies to the extent where reactionary rockers felt the need to launch a paranoid 'Disco Sucks' campaign at the end of the decade. Featuring artists like Chic, Sylvester, Donna Summer, Larry Levan and Frank Grasso, as well as a discussion of the clubs and labels that defined the period, Turn the Beat Around illustrates how and why disco changed the face of popular culture for ever.

Turn the Beat Around : The Rise and Fall of Disco

Arts & Photography

Music

For two centuries after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that someone else had written his plays. Since then dozens of candidates, including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, have been proposed. Combining scrupulous research with a close reading of Shakespeare's works, this absorbing book retraces a tortuous path strewn with fabricated documents to unravel the mystery of why so many people - including such eminent figures as Henry James and Sigmund Freud - have questioned his authorship.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Faber and Faber

Contested Will

<p>1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear:</p>

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear

History & Criticism

1606

Europe

Searching for Shakespeare

Stanley W. Wells

Tarnya Cooper

Marcia Pointon

National Portrait Gallery Publications

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Books by James-Shapiro