Jack Lynch

John T. Lynch

Becoming Shakespeare begins where most Shakespeare stories end, with his death in 1616. Jack Lynch has written the definitive biography of Shakespeare's afterlife: the fascinating tale of his unlikely transformation from provincial playwright to universal Bard. Unlike later literary giants, Shakespeare created no stir when he died. Within a few years he was nearly forgotten. And when London's theatres were shut down in 1642, he seemed destined for oblivion. With the Restoration in 1660, however, the theatres were open once again, and Shakespeare began his long ascent. No longer merely one playwright among many, he became the transcendent genius at the heart of English culture. Fifty years after the Restoration scholars began taking him seriously. Fifty years after that he was considered England's greatest genius. And by 1800 he was practically divine, what Jane Austen called 'part of an Englishman's constitution'. Jack Lynch brilliantly chronicles Shakespeare's afterlife - from the revival of his plays to the decades when his work was co-opted and 'improved' by politicians and other playwrights, and culminating with the 'Bardolatry' of the Stratford celebration of Shakespeare's three-hundredth birthday in 1864. Becoming Shakespeare is not only essential reading for anyone intrigued by the myth of Shakespeare, but it also offers a consideration of the vagaries of fame.

How a Dead Poet Became the World's Foremost Literary Genius

Becoming Shakespeare

A work of reference on 'the age of Johnson', putting literature in the context of the society that produced it.

Samuel Johnson in Context

In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. While taking up the critical philosophical questions surrounding fraud, Lynch shows that fakery takes us to the heart of eighteenth-century values as they relate to evidence, perception and memory, the relationship between art and life, historicism, and human motivation.

Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain

Tristam Shandy Bibliography

In the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, a team of leading experts surveys the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity. They provide a systematic overview, and restore these poetic works to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800

The intention of this collection is to bring together representative essays from a variety of critical perspectives, partly to give some sense of Franklin's achievement but also to draw attention to some of the inconsistencies, contradictions, and even failings that made him who he was. The book tries to examine Franklin from many points of view, in the hope of offering a composite portrait-though with no expectations that even the composite portrait will be complete or comprehensive.

John T. Lynch

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