Shakespeare’s Family by C. C. Stopes

Description

Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, an exacting Scottish historian, asked a stubborn question that literary biography tends to rush past: who exactly were the Shakespeares, and what can documents tell us about a family most biographers only borrow scenery from? Her answer is genealogy practiced at full discipline, tracing the name through early Warwickshire records, the arms the family sought and took up, and the wide kinship of the Ardens and their connections.

The chapters move outward from the name itself through localities, parishes and London branches, gathering every Shakespeare the records yield: the Stratford line, the descendants, collaterals and cousins, and the houses and farms the family lived in. Stopes writes without heroics, and precisely because she refuses to embellish, the picture that emerges of an ambitious, litigious, upward-climbing family is far more persuasive, and far more alive, than another volume of guesswork.

Why this study matters

• Primary-source discipline rare for its time, footnoted to the records.
• The family Shakespeare biography almost always trims to scenery, here made the subject.
• Essential groundwork for anyone seriously reading Shakespeare’s life.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 27 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.