GEORGINA FERRY has impeccable credentials as both a science and a Shakespeare buff. Having established herself as a science journalist through writing in New Scientist magazine and broadcasting on BBC Radio, she is today better known for her popular science books and scientific biographies (DOROTHY HODGKIN: A Life; THE COMMON THREAD: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome; A COMPUTER CALLED LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World’s First Office Computer; and MAX PERUTZ AND THE SECRET OF LIFE) and her articles on science and culture in the Guardian and Nature. On the theatre side, she is a founder member of the Abbey Shakespeare Players, who have performed each August for 23 years to sellout audiences in St Dogmaels Abbey, Pembrokeshire. In this capacity she has played roles from Miranda in The Tempest to Cerimon in Pericles, and directed productions of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV Part I and Part II.

 

Links

Georgina Ferry's website

ROUGH MAGIC 

Shakespeare’s World of Science

A narrative account of the Elizabethan scientific world view, informed by Shakespeare’s astonishing reference to science in his plays.

 

Writing on the eve of the scientific revolution, Shakespeare displays a profound understanding of bee colonies, gardening, earthquakes, climate change, the vacuum, planetary motion, eclipses, geometry, ballistics, windmills, watchmaking, atomism, venereal disease, mercury poisoning, alchemy, melancholia, nature versus nurture, and much more. Just how did he acquire this knowledge?

Short and entertaining, ROUGH MAGIC is intended as much for people interested in science as for those interested in Shakespeare. The last time anything similar was attempted was Cumberland Clark's 1929 book Shakespeare and Science, since when there has been a great deal more Shakespeare scholarship, and also some fascinating studies of the science of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period.

Publisher: Bloomsbury (UK)
Delivery: Spring 2011
Publication: Autumn 2011
Status: Proposal and sample writing
Length: 60,000–80,000 words

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth

For World English Language rights contact Ruth Logan at Bloomsbury