Skip to main content

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare

Stratford, London and In Between

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare cover

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare

Stratford, London and In Between

Description

Shakespeare's extraordinarily ordinary life condenses into a charming but brief biography in this arresting tale of love, loss and return. Beginning with the early departure to the final homecoming, Paul Menzer considers the wonder of Shakespeare's story with the little facts we have about his life to guide us through the language and characters which define Shakespeare.

Life events are glimpsed across Shakespeare's wide-ranging output, be it personal quest and departure from a small town in The Taming of The Shew, the death of a father and the cruel loss of his own son in Hamlet, or retirement and old age in The Tempest's figure of Prospero. Menzer honours the well-known stories without neglecting the mysteries of why Shakespeare left Stratford, who he ran with in London and why he put down his pen to come home to Anne and his family again, and again.

This edition is adapted from William Shakespeare: A Brief Life with an updated introduction, further connections between Shakespeare's works and personal biography, new illustrations of Shakespeare's journey between London and Stratford, cutting-edge scholarship and recent archival discoveries about Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • EPUB 3.0
  • Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
  • WCAG level AA
  • WCAG v2.2 compliant
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

  • No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
  • Has alternative text descriptions for images

Visual adjustments

Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
  • Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
  • Purposes of all links are made clear

Rich content

Language tagging provided

Table of Contents

Preface: The Complete Life of William Shakespeare

Chapter 1. Shakespeare's Dead
Chapter 2. Earth Unto Earth
Chapter 3. Shakespeare at School
Chapter 4. Anne Hathaway, aka
Chapter 5. The Lost Years
Chapter 6. Stratford in the Rear View
Chapter 7. Enter London
Chapter 8. Shakespeare, playwright
Chapter 9. Shakespeare, poet
Chapter 10. Shakespeare's Company
Chapter 11. William Shakespeare, gent.
Chapter 12. Shakespeare at Court
Chapter 13. Shakespeare's Globe?
Chapter 14. Shakespeare's Properties
Chapter 15. The King's Man
Chapter 16. The Plague Years
Chapter 17. Shakespeare's Daughters
Chapter 18. The Returning Point
Chapter 19. Shakespeare's Head
Chapter 20. Arrivals and Departures
Chapter 21. I am Dead
Chapter 22. Heaven is a Library

Epilogue: Yellow Leaves
Notes
Index

Product details

The Arden Shakespeare
Published 29 Sep 2026
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 240
ISBN 9781350542648
Imprint The Arden Shakespeare
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Related Titles

Environment: Staging