HIS EXITS AND HIS ENTRANCES

by Louis Marder ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 1963

Today, like a colossus, Shakespeare bestrides the literate world, but that wasn't always the case. So in one of those research papers like a wedding cake, book-burrowing chef Louis Marder sifts through layer upon layer of the Bard's posthumous reputation: the ups and downs at Drury Lane, the Garrick heydays, the Elizabethan revival and German Romanticism, the fads in textual criticism from the Coleridge and Bradley to Eliot and Knight, the biographical controversies, the piratical publishings, the varying editions (there are over 1000 now in 70 lingos) and the Festivals and Stratford pilgrimages (Andrew Carnegie, incidentally, regarded the birthplace more sacred than the Holy Sepulchre). However, Tolstoy felt an ""insuperable repulsion"" over even Lear and Hamlet, George II loathed the bombast, and it wasn't until the mid-19th century that Shakespeare came into his own at the universities. A dispassionate labor of love, a kind of bibliography with commentary, strictly for the specialists.

Pub Date: May 6, 1963

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION