Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.
No moral lessons, just gorgeous language and vibrant voices lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays.
So argues Canadian multihyphenate Gilbert (a novelist, playwright, and founder of a gay theater in Toronto), who also argues that “the recent intrusion of the woke left into aesthetics…threatens to destroy art.” This mindset, he states, has transformed artistic works into vehicles for didactic and/or propagandist ends. In this collection of essays, Gilbert, working from the premise that the analytical, “left brain cultural takeover” began during Shakespeare’s life, analyzes how the Bard’s plays and poems reveal a rejection of reason and empiricism. He begins by observing that Shakespeare’s writing style is as complex as it is heavily connotative, which he sees as atypical for an era when most writers followed one of three styles: “grand, middle or low.” Indeed, the Bard often adopted a variety of styles within single passages of text. His stylistic “slipperiness” extends to how he played arguments and counterarguments against each other to create works “steeped in paradox.” That, Gilbert suggests, marks Shakespeare’s plays as amoral and the playwright as a skeptic. He further argues that the playwright’s commitment to rhetoric and language before all else placed him in a position where he could simply allow his characters to speak and act rather than use them to reveal any particular social or political bent. Working during a time when theater was under attack by Puritans, who favored plays that moralized, the Bard chose instead to follow a Classical aesthetic grounded in the thinking of philosophers like Gorgias, who believed that “what is real is defined by the artist in collaboration with the audience.” Shakespeare, then, was not only a literary craftsman but also an early modern aesthete dedicated to creating beauty rather than delivering messages for the ages. This view of Shakespeare is hardly new, but its application to today’s woke culture is stimulating, if not necessarily persuasive.
Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771839037
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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