Description: In modern life we are all too familiar with ideas of image and celebrity. This highly original study investigates the early evolution of Shakespeare's public 'image', or reputation, as a man, an actor and a poet.
Brief description: Katherine Duncan-Jones is a Professor of Early Modern English at Somerville College, Oxford. Priomarily interested in Elizabethan literature, history and biography, especially with reference to original texts and sources in manuscript and early editions she is currently researching Shakespeare's reputation from 1592-1623. Publications include Shakespeare's Sonnets (ed., Arden Shakespeare, 1997) and the critically acclaimed biography Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (Arden Shakespeare, 2010).
Review Quotes: 'Shakespeare, in this analysis, is characterised as someone who had to assert his own position amid a fiercely hierarchical society...Duncan-Jones demonstrates that Shakespearean self-promotion was as much literary as social.'
Peter J Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement