Postmodern recreations of the Renaissance: Robert Nye’s fictional biographies of William Shakespeare
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| Formato: | Artículo científico |
| Lenguaje: | en |
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Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies
2005
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| _version_ | 1876422811868725248 |
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| author | Sofía MUÑOZ VALDIVIESO |
| author_facet | Sofía MUÑOZ VALDIVIESO |
| contents | Postmodern recreations of the Renaissance: Robert Nye’s fictional biographies of William Shakespeare Sofía MUÑOZ VALDIVIESO Lengua y Literatura William Shakespeare has been present as a character in works of fiction since the eighteenth century and his life as a Renaissance playwright has been re-imagined in fictional biographies since the nineteenth century. The present article analyses the recreation of the Bard in Robert Nye’s Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993) and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998), two novels that articulate in fiction the renewed fascination with Shakespeare’s life at the turn of the millennium that has produced several new scholarly biographies. Both novels were published in the nineties, the decade of the Shakespeare film boom that popularised his work in the mass media and produced the most widely popular recreation of his life to date, the Hollywood success Shakespeare in Love (1998). These two novels participate in the demystification of Shakespeare the man generally found in contemporary fictional recreations of his life that react against the reverential idealisation of the Bard in nineteenth-century fictional biographies. They provide a humorous and irreverent portrait of Shakespeare as a man of failings and rotten teeth, while their vibrant celebration of his language and the evocation of the sights and sounds of his time contribute to the circulation and visibility of his words in contemporary culture. While professional biographers strive to create a portrait of the author that readers may accept as the true one and their effort is guided by plausibility, Robert Nye’s kaleidoscopic portraits of the playwright through the gaze of his wife and a former boy actor of his company in these two novels celebrate the impossibility of ever writing a definite biography of William Shakespeare, since no hard fact can ever bring us closer to the playwright than the works themselves, which are inevitably mediated by the present and by the cultural construct that has been erected around him through the ages. 2005 artículo científico 1135-7789 https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=333527601003 en http://www.redalyc.org/revista.oa?id=3335 SEDERI Yearbook application/pdf Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies SEDERI Yearbook (España) Num.15 |
| format | Artículo científico |
| id | redalyc_333527601003 |
| institution | Redalyc |
| language | en |
| publishDate | 2005 |
| publisher | Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies |
| spellingShingle | Postmodern recreations of the Renaissance: Robert Nye’s fictional biographies of William Shakespeare Sofía MUÑOZ VALDIVIESO Lengua y Literatura Postmodern recreations of the Renaissance: Robert Nye’s fictional biographies of William Shakespeare Sofía MUÑOZ VALDIVIESO Lengua y Literatura William Shakespeare has been present as a character in works of fiction since the eighteenth century and his life as a Renaissance playwright has been re-imagined in fictional biographies since the nineteenth century. The present article analyses the recreation of the Bard in Robert Nye’s Mrs Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993) and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998), two novels that articulate in fiction the renewed fascination with Shakespeare’s life at the turn of the millennium that has produced several new scholarly biographies. Both novels were published in the nineties, the decade of the Shakespeare film boom that popularised his work in the mass media and produced the most widely popular recreation of his life to date, the Hollywood success Shakespeare in Love (1998). These two novels participate in the demystification of Shakespeare the man generally found in contemporary fictional recreations of his life that react against the reverential idealisation of the Bard in nineteenth-century fictional biographies. They provide a humorous and irreverent portrait of Shakespeare as a man of failings and rotten teeth, while their vibrant celebration of his language and the evocation of the sights and sounds of his time contribute to the circulation and visibility of his words in contemporary culture. While professional biographers strive to create a portrait of the author that readers may accept as the true one and their effort is guided by plausibility, Robert Nye’s kaleidoscopic portraits of the playwright through the gaze of his wife and a former boy actor of his company in these two novels celebrate the impossibility of ever writing a definite biography of William Shakespeare, since no hard fact can ever bring us closer to the playwright than the works themselves, which are inevitably mediated by the present and by the cultural construct that has been erected around him through the ages. 2005 artículo científico 1135-7789 https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=333527601003 en http://www.redalyc.org/revista.oa?id=3335 SEDERI Yearbook application/pdf Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies SEDERI Yearbook (España) Num.15 |
| title | Postmodern recreations of the Renaissance: Robert Nye’s fictional biographies of William Shakespeare |
| topic | Lengua y Literatura |
| url | https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=333527601003 |