Shakespeare’s Book
The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio
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Narrated by:
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Philip Pope
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By:
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Chris Laoutaris
About this listen
‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’
FINANCIAL TIMES
‘This is Shakespearean scholarship at its best, brilliantly researched yet compulsively readable. It's a book for our times, enduringly fascinating and appealing to both enthusiasts and the general reader. Highly recommended!’ ALISON WEIR
FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER
A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
A BBC RADIO 4 FRONT ROW NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
AN AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labour of love that went into creating the first collection.
Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions that intersected with the lives of its creators. Shakespeare scholar Dr Chris Laoutaris uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare ’ s book, as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threatened its completion. And he considers how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping the transmission of his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him ‘not of an age, but for all time’.
‘Beautifully written and utterly compelling… comprises all the drama, intrigue and surprises of a Shakespeare play' Tracy Borman
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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-
Story
At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange - they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.
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DO LISTEN TO THIS BOOK!!!
- By JK on 10-28-21
By: Orlando Figes
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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books
- Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library
- By: Edward Wilson-Lee
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells the story of the first and greatest visionary of the print age, a man who saw how the explosive expansion of knowledge and information generated by the advent of the printing press would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. He also happened to be Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son.
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Erudite. Stimulating. Rewarding.
- By R. P. RIBEYRE on 10-26-20
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Printer's Error
- Irreverent Stories from Book History
- By: Rebecca Romney, J. P. Romney
- Narrated by: J.P. Romney
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn't been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer's Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg's name doesn't appear anywhere on it.
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Porn for Ye Old Bibliophiles
- By George M. Liveakos on 03-24-17
By: Rebecca Romney, and others
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- By: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
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Excellent!
- By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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Thomas Cromwell
- A Revolutionary Life
- By: Diarmaid MacCulloch
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the 16th century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king's insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540. After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry's mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.
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Not about the Tudors
- By J.Brock on 09-18-19
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Botticelli's Secret
- The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
- By: Joseph Luzzi
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished.
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Great story
- By Chris M on 12-09-22
By: Joseph Luzzi
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The Florentines
- From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization
- By: Paul Strathern
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of Western civilization. Painting, sculpture, and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born - or emerge in an entirely new guise.
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Narrator ruins the narrative
- By amavita on 03-24-22
By: Paul Strathern
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King Richard III
- By: William Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Kenneth Branagh, Geraldine McEwan, Nicholas Farrell, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in 1593, King Richard III is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. This play differs from its predecessors, being amore structured piece, examining the development and motivations of a single character, Richard Duke of Gloucester, who will stop at nothing to gain control of the throne occupied by his brother Edward IV.
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Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end
- By Darwin8u on 03-16-17
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The Library
- A Fragile History
- By: Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.
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Stays on point
- By Alex on 04-29-23
By: Andrew Pettegree, and others
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The Year of Lear
- Shakespeare in 1606
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
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Detailed and satisfying
- By Tad Davis on 02-24-16
By: James Shapiro
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Paris, City of Dreams
- Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Creation of Paris
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Tim H. Dixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historian Mary McAuliffe vividly recaptures the Paris of Napoleon III, Claude Monet, and Victor Hugo as Georges Haussmann tore down and rebuilt Paris into the beautiful City of Light we know today. Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of the City of Light during Napoleon III’s Second Empire into the beloved city of today.
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Superb
- By Cheri Stocking on 02-17-23
By: Mary McAuliffe
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Brand Luther
- How an Unheralded Young Minister Turned His Small German Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe - and Started the Protestant Reformation
- By: Andrew Pettegree
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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When an obscure monk named Martin Luther tacked his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, protesting corrupt practices, he was virtually unknown. Within months his ideas spread across Germany then all of Europe; within years their author was not just famous but infamous, responsible for catalyzing the violent wave of religious reform that would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation and engulfing Europe in decades of bloody war.
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Informed, Impacting
- By Bill Martin on 01-14-16
By: Andrew Pettegree