A delightfully provocative set of essays about Christopher Marlowe.
A collection of academic essays proposes that key Shakespearean works were written by Christopher Marlowe.
Twenty-seven essays and summaries are presented here, 20 of which were written by Morgan herself, the remainder by Marlowe scholars. In her introduction, the editor comments on how academia is mainly composed of “traditionalists resistant to the idea someone other than the Stratford Shakespeare wrote the works.” Morgan suggests that the pieces presented here offer “a broader look at Marlowe than is currently taught in the universities.” The opening essay by Morgan, “The Sonnets of Exile,” provides a close reading of specific Shakespearean sonnets to argue for Marlowe’s penmanship. Elsewhere, the respected author A.D. Wraight’s essay, published posthumously, challenges the authorship of Shakespeare’s King Henry VI. Other essays include Alex Jack’s proposal that messages about Marlowe can be found in Hamlet and Isabel Gortazar’s piece that suggests that a minor character in The Taming of the Shrew may offer an overlooked clue for the authorship debate. Morgan delivers an absorbing close analysis of Shakespeare’s works throughout. One detailed rereading of the sonnets claims: “Sonnet 74 gives the reason” Marlowe’s “death had to be feigned (that fell arrest without all bail shall carry me away), and reveals how he ‘died’ (The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife).” The academic style used throughout is suitably formal but rarely technically confounding, its natural clarity rendering it accessible to a wide audience. Even those unfamiliar with the authorship theory will appreciate the concise summaries of landmark theses, such as Wraight’s observations on Marlowe and the play Edward III by Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. This material provides a vital entry point into the subject. But Gortazar’s essay steals the show with its audacious code-breaking. The author cunningly unravels “the riddle of SLY” associated with the inebriated tinker Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew—with Sly’s adventures purportedly mirroring the fate of Marlowe himself: “Sly is not dead, the corpse described by these lines must be somebody else’s.” Readers may be disappointed that this collection does not include a broader range of critics, as Morgan delivers most of the commentary. Still, the essays here are sufficiently convincing and well researched to perpetuate and bolster the Marlowe scholars’ response to the Shakespeare authorship question.
A delightfully provocative set of essays about Christopher Marlowe.Pub Date: July 25, 2022
ISBN: 9781663233349
Page Count: 466
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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