An enthusiastic and unique assessment of the Shakespeare authorship question that, while still leaving the debate...
An argument in favor of Thomas Sackville as the author of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.
In this follow-up to The Apocryphal William Shakespeare (2011), Feldman expands on her contention that Elizabethan courtier Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, is the actual author of the plays and sonnets generally associated with William Shakespeare, while the actor William Shakespeare was actually responsible for a group of lesser plays mostly ignored by historians and critics. The book establishes 60 “attributes” that define the author (“Knowledge of the 1575 Kenilworth Festivities,” “Attracted to Both Magnificence and Simplicity”) then proceeds to find textual evidence for each attribute in Shakespeare’s writings, along with evidence that these clearly apply to Sackville. One chapter addresses each attribute’s applicability to writer Shakespeare, positing that few, if any, can be conclusively applied to the actor. The author is clearly knowledgeable about her subject, and she details her sources in an appendix of chapter notes, though as with The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, the format of the references makes it difficult to connect citations to the body of the narrative. While the idea that Thomas Sackville wrote Shakespeare’s plays may require too many assumptions and inferences to persuade the reader, Feldman is unquestionably convincing as a proponent of the pleasures of exploring the works from a new angle, “discovering how many lesser known and seldom performed Shakespearean works take on an entirely new interest and meaning from a Sackvillian perspective.” The arguments in favor of Thomas Sackville are unlikely to put an end to the ongoing debate over Shakespeare’s true identity, but Feldman has presented an engaging new perspective that gives Stratford-ian skeptics a strong new contender for the man behind the works.
An enthusiastic and unique assessment of the Shakespeare authorship question that, while still leaving the debate unresolved, may convince even open-minded Stratford-ians of the plausibility of its analysis.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-50-299647-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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