A model of popular Shakespearean scholarship: engagingly accessible and contagiously enthusiastic.
Thirlwell (Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown, 2010, etc.) turns to a fictional subject in her charming appraisal of the gender-bending protagonist of As You Like It.
Though the author claims to be “writing Rosalind’s biography,” this delightfully rambling text is more properly described as a blend of literary criticism and theater history. Among its theatrical virtues are Thirlwell’s memories of great Rosalinds she has seen, beginning with Vanessa Redgrave in 1962; thoughtful reflections on the part from a number of gifted contemporary actors, including Juliet Rylance and Fiona Shaw; and a vivid recap of historic Rosalinds, from Dorothy Jordan’s erotically charged 18th-century performances to Charlotte Cushman’s butch version in the Victorian era to Edith Evans’ glittering 1936 incarnation. On the literary side, Thirlwell explores Shakespeare’s sources for As You Like It, the medieval Tale of Gamelyn and Thomas Lodge’s 1590 romance Rosalynde, making the interesting point that Lodge’s heroine is gentler and more feminine than Shakespeare’s powerfully androgynous Rosalind. A later chapter on “Rosalind’s Daughters” strains a bit to include every feisty female from Jo March to Yentl, but a number of surprising quotes reveal that writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Pat Barker have been inspired by Rosalind. Thirlwell devotes the bulk of the book to an exegesis of the text, focusing on Rosalind’s liberation through cross-dressing and her education of Orlando to be worthy of her love. These are fairly standard points, but the author makes them in lucid prose that sweeps up readers in her love for Shakespeare’s thoroughly modern woman. It’s also nice to see underappreciated Celia get her due for wit and wisdom that very nearly equal her cousin Rosalind’s, and Orlando—who can fade into the Forest of Arden in a bland performance—comes to life in Thirlwell’s sensitive appreciation as a romantic juvenile who grows into love between equals.
A model of popular Shakespearean scholarship: engagingly accessible and contagiously enthusiastic.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-335-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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