A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.
Massive biography of the Bard creates as many myths as it debunks.
Any who harbor doubts as to creativity’s vital role in scholarly work need look no further than here. Weis (English/University College, London; The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 2001, etc.) uncorks great casks of knowledge about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare’s oeuvre to animate the Bard’s rich life and times. To reconstruct—some would say, construct—this life about which so little is known, he sets biographical criticism on its ear by attempting to exhume otherwise hidden events in Shakespeare’s life from his work, while simultaneously using known historical occurrences to inform critical readings of the texts. “The plays and poems contain important clues to Shakespeare’s inner life and to real, tangible, external events he experienced,” Weis writes. “There is a cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence that demonstrates beyond doubt that Shakespeare responded in his work to key events of his life….to disembody the plays and poems from the life of their author is as counterintuitive as seeking to separate him from the national history of his era.” The author’s impassioned investigations lead him to advance all kinds of qualified theories, often preceded by the words ‘might,’ ‘may have,’ ‘probably,’ ‘almost certainly,’ ‘must have,’ etc. For instance: The sonnets’ fair youth, dark lady and rival poet were, respectively, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Emilia Bassano, daughter of a court musician; and Christopher Marlowe, with whom Shakespeare may have had a physical relationship. Also: The glover’s son from Stratford was a poacher, father of dramatist William Davenant and, perhaps most intriguingly, lame. (The possible causes of his limp occupy nearly an entire chapter.) Alongside these speculative conclusions, Weis provides engaging historical commentary on the period.
A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7501-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
