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2 results

What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
  • Stanley Wells
  • Foreword by Stephen Fry
  • Published online:
    14 September 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • Sir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteries of how Shakespeare lived, whom and how he loved, how he worked, how he produced some of the greatest and most abidingly popular works in the history of world literature and drama, have fascinated readers for centuries. This concise, crystalline book conjures illuminating insights to reveal Shakespeare as he was. Wells brings the writer and dramatist alive, in all his fascinating humanity, for readers of today.

  • 4 - What Made Shakespeare Laugh?

  • Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon
  • Foreword by Stephen Fry
  • Book:
    What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
    Published online:
    14 September 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023, pp 89-114

  • Summary

    For the last chapter I decided that I wanted to write about Shakespeare’s sense of humour. I thought I would write about how – if at all – it is possible to know what made him smile and laugh. And I wanted to think about how this relates to our sense of his overall personality and of how that changed and developed over the years. But when I started actually to try to write the chapter, I began to think it would be a great deal easier to write a whole, rather long book about the subject than to try to encompass it within a single chapter. I also felt surprise that, so far as I know, no such book exists. Perhaps that is because it is easier to talk and write about tragedy, which we all know is a very serious matter, than about comedy, which it’s too easy to think of as a trivial matter.