Going against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in early modern England, James Shapiro presents how Elizabethans imagined Jews to be utterly different from themselves--in religion, race, nationality, and even sexuality. From strange cases of Christians masquerading as Jews to bizarre proposals to settle foreign Jews in Ireland, this book looks into the crisis of cultural identity in Elizabethan England and sheds new light on The Merchant of Venice.

Presents the history of Shakespeare, following him through a single year that changed not only his fortunes, but the course of literature. In this one year, we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw, and who he worked with as he creates four of his most famous plays - "Henry V", "Julius Caesar", "As You Like It", and "Hamlet".

'Contested Will' unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi).

Following the biographical style of 1599, this book traces Shakespeare's life and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it into his most searing tragedy, King Lear.