The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594
Sams, who edited Shakespeare's Lost Play: Edmund Ironside (St. Martin's, 1986), which he identified as a Shakespearean play, tosses a grenade into the polite world of Shakespearean scholarship in this polemical book. His premise is that modern biographers and textual scholars have misled everyone regarding the facts about Shakespeare's life and works. Basing his claims on documentary data about Shakespeare dating from 1509 to 1594, Sams argues that early biographical information is more reliable than the theories of modern scholars. He also argues that Shakespeare was successful in the London theater years earlier than conventional scholarship asserts, and that he regularly revised his work. Sams claims that "memorial construction" (the orthodox view that the Bad Quartos are corrupt texts reconstructed by rogue actors) is bizarre fantasy for which there is no evidence, instead insisting that the Bad Quartos are early versions of Shakespeare's plays that he later revised. If Sams is right, the dating of the entire canon will have to be revised. This book is sure to provoke heated debate in academic circles; the general reader will be fascinated, too.Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.