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Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story (Paperback)

by Stanley Wells (Author) "Early one morning in 1600 or 1601, boys ran around London sticking up bills announcing that if you went to the Globe playhouse on the..." (more)

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This item: Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story by Stanley Wells
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Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Penguin (30 Aug 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0141017139
ISBN-13: 978-0141017136
Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2 cm

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 106,362 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Sunday Times

A richly enjoyable work. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

One of the most sane and exciting books on Shakespeare I have read for a long time. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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First Sentence
Early one morning in 1600 or 1601, boys ran around London sticking up bills announcing that if you went to the Globe playhouse on the south bank of the River Thames that afternoon you could see a new play called Hamlet. Read the first page

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	70% buy the item featured on this page: Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story 5.0 out of 5 stars (1) �5.81
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5.0 out of 5 stars Accessible rather than academic, & all the better for it, 17 Aug 2008

By	Murray "Murray Ewing" (West Sussex, UK) - See all my reviews

"With the passing of the years Shakespeare has too often been isolated from his fellows. He is the greatest of them, but he would not have been what he is without them." -- so says Stanley Wells at the conclusion of what is a wonderfully readable look at the theatrical scene of Shakespeare's day. Concentrating on the Bard's contemporaries rather than the man himself (more than adequately covered elsewhere), Shakespeare & Co is accessible rather than academic (though by no means lightweight), and an excellent introduction to those figures who hover on the edges of Shakespeare's biography, all too undeservingly like like bit-players in somebody else's drama. Individual chapters cover the theatrical scene (how plays were put together and presented, how they fit into the political mood of the time, and so on), and a brief look at some of the well-known actors of the day, before we get to the playwrights: Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher & Francis Beaumont, and a rather short chapter on John Webster.

The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes and details about the lives of the people covered, reminding you what a Bohemian, and odd, bunch writers can be. There's the self-destructive Marlowe, an atheistical spy who declared that he had as much right to coin money as the Queen of England; Ben Jonson the tireless self-promoter convinced he was the one writing classics for the ages; the cohabiting bachelors Fletcher & Beaumont "with one wench in the house between them" -- large-as-life figures who make Shakespeare's quiet (or at least un-recorded) life seem rather tame and level-headed in comparison.

But Wells's book is as much about the works of the playwrights in question as their lives, with a particular focus on the bearing they have on Shakespeare's plays. Wells points out where the playwrights borrowed from each other, or made jokes or references to one another's works, but as things tend to centre around Shakespeare, Wells's look at the playwrights works doesn't tend to stray too far from those that touch on the Bard's.

All in all, you get the impression of a bustling and creative scene, driven by business, politics and public demand as much as artistry, and the playwrights as much jobbing writers as any Hollywood hack or pulp fictioneer. Wells occasionally points out how the writers he covers have suffered as a result of Shakespeare's success -- their works are inevitably judged as not-quite-Shakespeare, rather than being taken on their own merits, and the product of different artistic sensibilities and aims.

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