Shakespeare at Thirty offers an original account of Shakespeare鈥檚 early career by returning to a moment before his fame was assured: the spring of 1594, when he turned thirty amid plague closures, censorship, social upheaval, financial insecurity, and professional uncertainty. Instead of reading Shakespeare鈥檚 beginnings through the lens of later achievement, Rory Loughnane reconstructs the precarious world in which a young actor-writer learned his craft and forged a path through a rapidly developing theatre scene.
Drawing on recent advances in textual scholarship, biography, and theatre history, the book sets Shakespeare鈥檚 early plays and poems within the collaborative literary networks and volatile theatre world of late-Elizabethan London. It examines the forms of co-authorship underlying many of Shakespeare鈥檚 early works; the pressures that plague, censorship, and the authorities put on those working in the theatre; the economics of patronage; and the emerging commercial structures that enabled the repertory system. Above all, it describes a young author who was talented but far from secure, shaped by peers, circumstance, and contingency as much as by innate genius.
By offering a rare biographical and critical portrait of the dramatist before he became a cultural icon, Shakespeare at Thirty restores uncertainty to Shakespeare鈥檚 twenties, revealing how he had to grapple with questions of direction, opportunity, and ambition that confront all young artists, and challenging the narratives of inevitability that dominate many Shakespeare biographies. The result sheds new light on his early career鈥攁nd reminds us that Shakespeare, too, had to become himself.
Rory Loughnane is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. His many books include Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship. He is overseeing a new Oxford edition of the collected works of Christopher Marlowe.
"An insightful study of the first 30 years of William Shakespeare’s life. . . . [Rory] Loughnane’s unique approach perceptively demonstrates that Shakespeare’s success was far from inevitable. Readers will relish this fresh take on the Bard."鈥�Publishers Weekly
“This richly detailed tour through the first three decades of Shakespeare’s life invites us to suspend the celebratory cult of genius. In place of the marble statue of the Bard, Loughnane gives us a vivid portrait of a young writer struggling to find his way, complete with false starts, wrong turns, and sudden intimations of possible sublimity.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe
“Rory Loughnane’s book is a terrific and original counter to most Shakespeare biographies, which skip over this early morass of jointly written, revised, and otherwise understood as disappointing or anticipatory plays.”—Emma Smith, author of This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World’s Greatest Playwright
“Shakespeare at Thirty is a tour de force, covering early modern theatre from its sixteenth century roots to the early years of Shakespeare’s career, when he ‘was a relative nobody trying to find his way.’ Focusing on the young Shakespeare, the book looks in depth at the cultural, historical, and theatrical context behind the beginnings of his career. Essential reading, this is the best book on the subject.”—Katherine West Scheil, author of Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway
“Taking us back to the days of London’s early theatre scene, Rory Loughnane’s brilliant Shakespeare at Thirty offers the nearest thing possible to time travel. Like contemporaries who have been to every play and read every news pamphlet, we witness legal brawls, murders, threats of invasion, plague, and playwrights’ quarrels. The result is an unforgettable new vantage point from which to understand how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”—Lorna Hutson, author of Circumstantial Shakespeare
“In this brilliant and beautifully written book, Rory Loughnane asks us to ‘stop the clock and . . . forget about what comes next’ in order to encounter Shakespeare before he turned thirty. The result is a magnificent account of a young writer whose astonishing future success, though far from inevitable, is surely in the making.”—Dympna Callaghan, author of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare
“Who and what was Shakespeare at thirty? Rory Loughnane convincingly conjures the jobbing playwright and newly published poet of 1594, still relatively unknown, with most of his life’s work still ahead of him. Loughnane proves a knowledgeable, engaging, and accessible guide to the worlds in which Shakespeare lived and wrote.”—Alan Stewart, author of Shakespeare’s Letters
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