Shakespeare through Letters

Shakespeare through Letters is at its best when we see it as an innovative way to view almost all of Shake-speare’s works, and one that requires the sweeping gaze and long experience of a scholar like Bergeron. * SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Combining scholarly expertise in early modern correspondence with a lifetime spent teaching, David Bergeron is uniquely qualified to guide us through the letters that permeate Shakespeare’s plays – letters that inform, amuse, woo, lie, betray; letters that are delivered, miscarried, read, unread, torn, burned, filed for posterity. In the first study to address every play in the canon, Bergeron shows how to use the letters as an entry point to understanding Shakespeare’s craft, and thus the dramas he crafted. With clear, accessible, yet penetrating analyses of each play, Bergeron demonstrates beyond doubt that if we know our letters, we’ll know our Shakespeare. -- Alan Stewart, Columbia University, author of Shakespeare's Letters
At a time when the collected letters of famous authors attract ever larger numbers of readers, David Bergeron makes up for the lack of any surviving letters from William Shakespeare by gathering together in Shakespeare Through Letters all the letters Shakespeare introduces into his comedies, histories, and tragedies. Drawing on the skills of close reading and sympathetic imagination displayed in his books on pageantry, patronage, and James I’s personal letters, Bergeron here opens up “the experience of letters” – experience that embraces characters within the fictions, actors on the stage, spectators in the theater, and “the great variety of readers” of Shakespeare’s printed texts. -- Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California, author of Phenomenal Shakespeare