Living with Shakespeare

'Living with Shakespeare offers a vivid portrait of Elizabethan London, one that brings to life St Helen's parish, Shakespeare's neighbourhood in the mid-1590s. A fascinating, deeply researched and beautifully illustrated study.' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 'Geoffrey Marsh is a scholar-detective, whose remarkable career at the V & A makes him a contemporary Autolycus, snapping up unconsidered trifles. A perfect sleuth for the investigation of Elizabethan London, his pioneering study of St Helen's Parish, Bishopsgate, brings to life, in the most brilliant and arresting detail, Shakespeare's day-to-day experience during some of his most formative years (1593-8). In the library of Shakespeare studies, there can be few volumes to rival this unique compendium for richness of detail or wealth of vivid contemporary insight. Marsh's attention to the character and humanity of the playwright's neighbours yields many suggestive footnotes to some world-famous lines. This portrait of a great writer's creative milieu is extraordinary and magnicent.' Robert McCrum, author of Shakespearean: On Life & Language in Times of Disruption 'Geoffrey Marsh offers the reader a fascinating, rich slice of London life in the late Elizabethan era. He focuses on lives of the people of the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate - which was home to one William Shakespeare for much of the 1590s, a period of transformation for the playwright and for theatre. Always a pleasure to read (but with its scrupulous research detailed in a lengthy Appendix), this beautifully illustrated book does indeed, as the author hopes, open up vistas upon Shakespeare and his world to people who only have a passing knowledge of his life. It will, however, also inform and intrigue Shakespeare scholars and practitioners.' Anna Beer, Kellogg College, University of Oxford Living with Shakespeare focuses on Shakespeare's life, following the 1593-4 plague, as he turned thirty, and was evolving from new 'arriviste' in London to established theatre professional. Packed with new discoveries from difficult-to-access manuscript records which include lay subsidy rolls, tithe records, census returns and parish registers, the book reveals the parish's complex social, religious, political and neighbourly intersections and influences. This story sheds new light on the influences which may have shaped a great writer as he finished Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice while re-establishing his family name, status and reputation. The microhistory of a London's parish is combined with broader cultural cross currents to contextualise the creativity of a global icon. Geoffrey Marsh is Director of the Department of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which holds the UK's National Collection of the Performing Arts.