Shakespeare's Books - A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sources

Author: Stuart Gillespie
Publisher: Continuum
Publication date: 2005-03-18
ISBN: 0826477755
Number of pages: 544
Format / Quality: PDF
Size: 11 MB


This encyclopedia-style Dictionary is a comprehensive reference guide to
Shakespeare's literary knowledge and recent scholarship on it. Nearly
200 entries cover the full range of literary writing Shakespeare was
acquainted with, and which influenced his own work, including classical,
historical, religious and contemporary works. It provides an overview
of his use of authors such as Virgil, Chaucer, Erasmus, Marlowe and
Samuel Daniel, whose influence is across the canon. Other entries cover
anonymous or collective works such as the Bible, Emblems, Homilies,
Chronicle History plays and the Morality tradition in drama. Entries
cover writers and works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged
more clearly in recent years due to new research. Others describe and
explain current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch,
Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources,
over 80 in number, feature surveys of the writer's place in
Shakespeare's time, detailed dicussion of the relationship to
Shakespeare's plays and poems, and full bibliography. Sample passages
from writers and texts of early modern England allow the volume to be
used also as a reader in the literature commonly known in Shakespeare's
era; these excerpts, together with reproductions of pages and
illustrations from the original texts, convey the flavor of the
material as Shakespeare would have encountered it.

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