The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent condition, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
The qualifications A. L. Rowse brings to the writing of this book are many and varied. Foremost, obviously, is his standing as the greatest living authority on Elizabethan England, a trained historian wonderfully at home among the byways, the modes of speech and thought, the events great and trivial of the whole age. Secondly, he is a practicing poet, with a poet's informed intuition in reading another poet's "shorthand." Add to these the advantage of a country boyhood amid customs surviving from Shakespeare's day, an acute knowledge of the ways by which men seek power, the ability to feel and convey excitement, and his fitness for this great venture comes clear.
Whole libraries have been written about Shakespeare: he has engaged the profoundest thought of the greatest critics of the past two hundred years. Yet it is safe to say that no hitherto existing work anticipates the contribution of this volume. Like his great protagonist, Rowse has taken what he needed where he found it his own far-ranging researches, the careful findings of specialists in many separate fields—and through his inspired use of the historical method he has fused it all into a single, new creation, a work of original scholarship and interpretation as fascinating as it is unique.
—from the dust jacket
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