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The life if Richard Wilson,the lugubrious actor best known from the series "One Foot In The Grave",whose on-screen incredulity is invariably marked by the droll if exasperated phrase "I dont believe it" only became an actor at the age of 30.Born the son of a Clyside shipyard timekeeper,he became a hospital lab technician,but after ten years gained a place at Londons celebrated RADA drama school as a mature student.
Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.
James Roose-Evans has delved deep into Richard Wilson's life to produce an enthralling portriat of one man's ambition to prove himself, and to succeed against the odds.
This two-volume set brings together a collection of writings and speeches by James Wilson, one of only six signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. His works had a significant impact on the deliberations that produced the cornerstone documents of American democracy.
Humour.