Early Shakespeare

In Early Shakespeare, A. Bronson Feldman, a scholar with wide-ranging inter-ests, uses biographical, historical, and psychoanalytic approaches to analyze Shakespeare’s first ten plays in the order of their composition. He shows that the author developed a pattern of alternating comedies with romances, begin-ning with The Comedy of Errors, and eventually engaged in an experiment in tragedy with the writing of Titus Andronicus. The result is a book that sheds light not only on these ten plays, but also on their author, the court of Eliza-beth, the conflicts of the time, and the culture of the period. It represents a major contribution to the scholarship associated with J. Thomas Looney’s discovery that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the true author behind the pen name William Shakespeare.