Shapiro’s discoveries of long-lost sources and missed connections make this a fascinating tale. His well-written, scholarly...
Shakespearean scholar Shapiro (English/Columbia Univ.; Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, 2010, etc.) links the tumultuous events of 1605 and 1606 to three of the Bard’s greatest works.
The author examines King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, all written in 1606. For readers seeking the nitty-gritty of historical connections and sources, Shapiro does not disappoint. Adjusting to the new Scottish king, James I, Elizabethan playwrights had to forego being English for British. Unfortunately, the union of crowns wasn’t official without the consent of Parliament. It was a sensitive issue both in England and Scotland, and artists presenting plays had to tread carefully. The plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 and a rumor of the king’s murder created a fraught atmosphere. The recurring plague transformed Shakespeare’s company, his competition, and the audiences to which they played, requiring further alteration to his plays. Shakespeare knew to disguise any events that spoke of broken kingdoms—not only in Lear, but also in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. He used the latest buzzwords—e.g., “equivocation” and “allegiance”—to expose the darkness in men’s (and women’s) hearts. King James was fixated on demonology, and Shakespeare used Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures to describe demonic possession and to reflect on social ills and the reasons people commit evil acts. Shakespeare adapted Lear from an older play staged 10 years before, and he strongly leaned on Plutarch’s biography for Antony, often using dialogue verbatim. He also used Plutarch’s account of a soothsayer in Macbeth, although his main source was Holinshed’s Chronicles. Shapiro points out the connections of Shakespeare’s plays to his own earlier work but also to whatever was at hand.
Shapiro’s discoveries of long-lost sources and missed connections make this a fascinating tale. His well-written, scholarly exploration will stand as an influential work that is a joy to read.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4164-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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