Shakespeare's Genealogies

About

William Shakespeare was fascinated with family dynamics, often using them to fuel his plots with familial jealousy, lust, murder, mistaken identity and long-lost siblings. Many of his works share characters that can be linked together by a common family history dating to pagan times. Vanessa James, professor of theater arts at Mount Holyoke College, unravels these lineages in a lecture at the Library of Congress. "Shakespeare's Genealogies: Plots and Illustrated Family Trees for All 42 Works," published by Melcher Media, is the follow-up to James' critically acclaimed book "Genealogy of Greek Mythology," in which she reveals the lineage of more than 3,000 mythical gods and mortals from ancient Greek texts. "Shakespeare's Genealogies" uses the same two-sided, accordion-fold, fully illustrated format as the Greek mythology volume. The accordion-fold allows one to read the book traditionally, page-by-page, or to unfold the work to 17 feet and view the intricacies of the lineages in their entirety. The book begins with a biography of Shakespeare, accompanied by his own family tree, and continues with charts organized according to category of play: Myths and Legends, Legends into History, Continental Plays, Roman History Plays and British History Plays. These categories diverge from the traditional grouping into tragedies, histories and comedies of the Bard's works. The unique reorganization of these plays is a product of James' own scholarship in order to better understand the…

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

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