"This engaging and fresh biography begins by examining how Shakespeare's life turns into myth so comfortably as to seduce even the most sceptical scholar. The early departure, the late return. Public success, private loss. A twilight of plays about family reunions, a death at home in the biggest house in town, the one he walked by as a schoolboy and eyed with envy, or at least ambition. Shakespeare led an orbital life, everything returned to where it began. He even had the dramatic good sense to die on his birthday. One of the appealing dynamics of the Shakespeare myth is the contrast of his humble beginnings and his lofty achievements, persuading us that genius might blossom anywhere. William Shakespeare: A Brief Life honours these myths, but also explores some of the mysteries: why Shakespeare left Stratford, who he ran with in London, why he put down his pen and at last came home again. Ultimately, the book explores the compelling contrast between the mere fifty two years Shakespeare lived, with the prolonged after lives of his work and his story, which show no sign of ending"--

'Life-writing' is a generic term meant to encompass a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, marginalia, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms (including blogs, tweets, Facebook entries). On Life-Writing offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, introducing readers to something of the range of forms the term encompasses, their changing fortunes and features, the notions of 'life,' 'self' and 'story' which help to explain these changing fortunes and features, recent attempts to group forms, the permeability of the boundaries between forms, the moral problems raised by life-writing in all forms, but particularly in fictional forms, and the relations between life-writing and history, life-writing and psychoanalysis, life-writing and philosophy. The essays mostly focus on individual instances rather than fields, whether historical, theoretical or generic. Generalizations are grounded in particulars. For example, the role of the 'life-changing encounter,' a frequent trope in literary life-writing, is pondered by Hermione Lee through an account of a much-storied first meeting between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; James Shapiro examines the history of the 'cradle to grave' life-narrative, as well as the potential distortions it breeds, by focusing on Shakespeare biography, in particular attempts to explain Shakespeare's so-called 'lost years'.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

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