Books by "Daniel William Kemp"
7 books found
How Shakespeare became Shakespeare: a riveting tale of London’s first playhouse and the people—actors, writers, builders, investors—who built the Theatre. Between 1576 and 1598, a playhouse called the Theatre stood in the northeast suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers used to build the much more famous Globe. Dreamed up and run by a former actor and notorious brawler named James Burbage, the Theatre was the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London. It was plagued by litigation, heavily in debt, and the target of endless condemnation by preachers and the Lord Mayor. It was also where the young William Shakespeare worked when he first arrived in London, and it was here that he wrote many of his early plays. At the heart of the Theatre was the dream of making money from creating art. This was Burbage’s dream, of course, but it was also Shakespeare’s, who worked with a close team of actors and cowriters at the Theatre, building the foundations of his own career and devising a way to make money from writing. Nobody had ever really done this before: playwrights in his time were notoriously poor; and the idea that one might earn a living from writing remains a faint and tempting one today. Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory is a story about art and money, creativity and craft, literary inspiration and the profit motive. The Theatre was a controversial, highly commercial factory for great and challenging art; into the dream factory walked the son of a Stratford tradesman, and out emerged the greatest writer in English.
Entries provide the likely sources for a name; describe historical and mythological backgrounds; examine Shakespeare's presentation of a character or place; and suggest various interpretations of a name. Each entry contains line citations to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. A guide to the historical, mythological, fictional, and geographic references that appear in Shakespeare's complete plays and poems, covering every name, proper adjective, official title, literary and mystical title, and place name.
Living the Dream tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King’s legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be received. Though Coretta Scott King’s mission to honor her husband’s commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed, nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King’s life and thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes, how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the arc of King’s legacy toward something he never would have expected, and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.