The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Shakespeare

(Paperback)

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Description

In the same winning formula as The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie (more than 300,000 copies sold) and The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes (1999), this all-new companion to Shakespeare will present The Bard in a new and exciting way in a new century. For students, scholars, theater lovers, and scholars - nearly everyone! - this book wraps some 400 years of Bardology into a lively and often unexpected package.In their witty and inimitable way, Dick Riley and Pam McAllister examine the whole dramatic canon, play by play, including dramas of disputed authorship. (The long poems and sonnets are also covered.) Included are inside stories on theater and film productions, "alternate" interpretations of the plays, Shakespeare's status around the world, the clubs and societies, the mysterious life - and even the question that has plagued critics almost from the day he put down his quill: whether Shakespeare even wrote the works attributed to him.

Reviews

"With an engaging blend of homage and irreverence, this book renders accessible the Bard's entire oeuvre." --Publishers Weekly
"The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Shakespeare is, as its title suggests, appropriate casual reading just about anywhere in the house, for it is an informative and delightful compendium to the poems and plays. The authors also offer interesting and sometimes arcane observations about Shakespeare's life, his theater, and the impact of his writing today. And at the end of their book, the authors even present an eady-to-use, Chinese-menu style chart for learning to scold like an expert at Elizabethan name-calling; one can come away from the pleasures here and flyte like a master!" --Gerald M. Pinciss, Hunter College * the Graduate Center
"Through careful, thoughtful, and objective illumination of the work, the man, the time period, and the people and places that inhabit the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare, as well as the world inhabited by Shakespeare himself, Riley and McAllister have compiled, perhaps, the most concise, yet all-encompassing book on the Bard to date. The greatest appeal here lies in the humorous, literate, sometimes irreverent, and always knowledgeable interpretation and synopsis of the entire dramatic canon, presented play by play....From an objective look at the authorship problem to Elizabethan holidays to a brief discourse on fools (Shakespearean and otherwise), The Bedside Companion is nothing if not thorough....Any reader will walk away from this book with an accessibility to the Bard's writings that very few works can offer....The authors have tailored a book to explicate the work and life of the greatest writer of the English language and to please two distinct audiencesthe playgoer and the literary scholarat the same time. This would seem to be a fool's venture, yet, as Shakespeare's plays have taught us, the fool is often endowed with more wisdom than the wisest of men." --Foreword Magazine
"A lot of good material divided into small portions and attractively displayed, like light snacks to be nibbled at random, a few at a time, as an undemanding yet satisfying supplement to whatever else one may be doing in the bed, bath, or armchair... Readers will find good grazing among a wealth of related subjects that liberally intersperse the entries on the plays... the book's authors... should be commended for the range of material they have assimilated and presented with considerable skill and accuracy. And a sense of humor." --Kansas City Star, November 4, 2001
"[A] clever and informative book....If you love Shakespeare, you'll love The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Shakespeare." --WTBF-FM, April 23, 2002

Author Bio

Dick Riley's novels and plays include collaboration on the best-selling Black Sunday (with Thomas Harris), Rite of Expiation, and the drama Middleman Out. He lives in White Plains, New York. Pam McAllister is the author of ten books, including three others in Continuum's Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion series which she co-authored with Dick Riley, on Shakespeare (2001), Sherlock Holmes (1999), and Agatha Christie (1979). Her other books include Death Defying: Dismantling the Execution Machinery in 21st Century U.S.A. (Continuum, 2003) about ending capital punishment and two books about women's use of nonviolent action for social justice. In 1982, she edited the groundbreaking anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (New Society Publishers), which the Village Voice called "one of the most important books you'll ever read." She currently writes a column for The Progressive Christian magazine.