A complex theory depending on many assumptions presents the not-entirely-implausible contention that William Shakespeare did...
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. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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