Another painstakingly detailed argument that questions the authorship of works attributed to William Shakespeare.
In this debut history book, Feldman digs through stacks of Elizabethan poetry, long-forgotten plays, and the collection of works including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It to argue that while the Stratford-born actor William Shakespeare wrote a series of undistinguished plays, someone else wrote the plays and sonnets generally admired as his works. Feldman’s candidate for the true author is nobleman Thomas Sackville, a theory she develops further in the book’s sequel, Thomas Sackville and the Shakespearean Glass Slipper. To support her interpretation of literary history, Feldman draws on a close reading of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, a group of works attributed to Shakespeare in the 1600s but generally discounted by subsequent scholars. Feldman’s theory also draws heavily on assumptions: events “probably” or “likely” occurred as the book describes them more than 120 times. Some of the inferences are entirely plausible (Thomas Sackville concealed his writing career because it was inconsistent with his status as a courtier), while others require a higher degree of credulity (“One suspects the man’s physical appearance was fairly typical for an Elizabethan, and that Greene simply couldn’t stand the sight of him”). Feldman’s theory also relies on literary analysis to establish conclusions about actual events, requiring the reader to assume quite a bit about authorial intention (“Pistol’s feisty lines convey the sense of an older playwright deciding to show the newcomers he could still write circles around them”). While the book rests on a solid base of documentary evidence and previous scholarship, Feldman’s decision to forego footnotes for an appendix of chapter notes and to “not attempt to document well-established historical facts or common scholarly opinions” make it challenging for readers less familiar with the source material to verify the book’s interpretations.
A complex theory depending on many assumptions presents the not-entirely-implausible contention that William Shakespeare did not write his famous plays.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-45-750721-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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