A persuasively argued book that provides a rich context for Shakespeare’s later years and works.
In his latest forensic biography, Nicholl tackles The Bard.
In a fashion similar to his previous explorations of such 16th-century luminaries as Christopher Marlowe (The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 1994), Sir Walter Raleigh (The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado, 1996) and Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind, 2004), Nicholl examines a curious biographical shard unearthed in 1909 and largely ignored since: the brief deposition then-48-year-old Shakespeare gave on May 11, 1612, in a suit brought by Stephen Belott against Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare’s former landlord. Belott accused his father-in-law of having reneged on the £60 dowry (today worth about £12,000, Nicholl estimates) promised when he wed Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604 and was now seeking restitution. When called as a witness, Shakespeare, a tenant in Mountjoy’s London residence on Silver Street from approximately 1603 to 1605, said he knew Belott was promised a dowry but couldn’t quite recall the amount. “His statement,” writes Nicholl, “like the signature beneath it, is adequate and no more.” Intrigued by both the ambiguity and impartiality of Shakespeare’s testimony, Nicholl leaps from the court papers (transcribed in full in the appendix) of this mild domestic squabble into a comprehensive analysis of what Shakespeare might have observed during his stay in that unhappy household, and how he may well have drawn upon those experiences in creating Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That End’s Well, King Lear, all written during or shortly after the Silver Street years. He suggests: “The ‘unconsidered trifles’ of domestic life are snapped up by the dramatist. They go into the mix, enriching it with secret flavours of particularity which are, for the most part, unknown to us.”
A persuasively argued book that provides a rich context for Shakespeare’s later years and works.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01850-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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