Books about Dramatist from Amazon.com

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.

Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air," "foregone conclusion," "one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's—the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

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A publishing event! The first and definitive collection of letters (most of them previously unpublished) both from and to the incomparable Noël Coward, a unique and irresistible portrait of a society and age—from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.

The range, charm, and vitality of his talents—he was a playwright, actor, composer, librettist, lyricist, director, painter, writer, cabaret singer, wit—brought him into close encounters, and often close friendship, with the great and the gifted. He knew everybody who was anybody in the theater and in the movies, in literature and in politics, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among those at his “marvelous party”: George Bernard Shaw . . . T. E. Lawrence . . . Virginia Woolf . . . the Churchills . . . Daphne Du Maurier . . . Greta Garbo (she wrote asking him to marry her; he wrote back saying he almost accepted) . . . Ian Fleming . . . W. Somerset Maugham . . . Marlene Dietrich (he advised her, “To hell with God damned ‘L’Amour.’ It always causes far more trouble than it is worth”) . . . Tallulah Bankhead . . . Edith Sitwell . . . FDR . . . Gertrude Lawrence (in a cable about Private Lives: “Have written delightful new comedy stop good part for you stop wonderful one for me stop”), and many more.

There are letters about his productions of Bitter Sweet . . . Cavalcade . . . In Which We Serve . . . Brief Encounter . . . Private Lives, etc. . . . about his activities during World War II (he was a spy for the British government along with co-conspirator Cary Grant) . . . about the move to make him a knight that was endorsed in a personal letter from King George VI and blocked by Winston Churchill. Here are letters to and from his beloved mother, Violet . . . his longtime set and costume designer, Gladys Calthrop . . . his traveling companion from the 1930s on, Lord Amherst . . . and his business manager and onetime lover, Jack Wilson, in which he reveals his “secret heart.”

Profoundly savvy, witty, loving, bitchy, and often surprisingly moving, The Letters of Noël Coward gives us “Destiny’s Tot” at his crackling best. An irresistible portrait of a time, of the man himself, and of the world he lived in and enchanted.

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Published in 1949 by John Lehman. Very good copy in a very good dust jacket with slight wear. There are minor foxing, nicks, and wear to the dust jacket, with an ink inscription The basis of the 1951 film (winner of three Academy Awards) starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, Williams's play is one of the works by which 20th-century America defines itself. First English edition of this landmark, Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, featuring Williams's riveting creations..
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A brilliantly drawn detective story with entirely new insights into ShakespeareÂ’s life

In 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a court case at Westminster and it is the only occasion on which his actual spoken words were recorded. The case seems routine—a dispute over an unpaid marriage dowry—but it opens an unexpected window into the dramatist’s famously obscure life. Using the court testimony as a springboard, acclaimed nonfiction writer Charles Nicholl examines this fascinating period in Shakespeare’s life. With evidence from a wide variety of sources, Nicholl creates a compelling, detailed account of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked during the time in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear. The case also throws new light on the puzzling story of Shakespeare’s collaboration with the hack author and violent brothel owner George Wilkins.

In The Lodger Shakespeare we see the playwright in the daily context of a street in Jacobean London: “one Mr. Shakespeare,” lodging in the room upstairs. Nicholl is one of the great historical detectives of our time and in this atmospheric and exciting book he has created a considerable rarity—something new and original about Shakespeare..
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"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration "—Dan Cryer, Newsday

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.

Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.

A best book of the year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004 • Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book • A Washington Post Book World Rave • An Economist Best Book • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book • NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best.
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These and many more classic and never-before-told tales are collected in The Dog Says How. In Kling’s universe, “the mundane becomes magical, the fantastic becomes accessible and through it all his profound sense of curiosity about the world transforms the everyday to the timeless” (Queen Anne News).

Kevin Kling is a well-known playwright and storyteller, and his commentaries can be heard on NPR’s All Things Considered. His plays and adaptations have been performed around the world. He lives in Minneapolis.