A sparkling, insightful exploration of Shakespeare’s words and world.
How Shakespeare understood women.
The founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, Packer (Tales from Shakespeare, 2004, etc.) brings 40 years of experience as a director and actor to her invigorating examination of Shakespeare’s women. Her fascination with these roles inspired her to create a one-woman performance piece, followed by a two-actor piece, five plays and, finally, this book. At present, she has relinquished the directorship of Shakespeare & Company to tour in Women of Will with her acting partner, Nigel Gore. Packer sees a clear spiritual growth, reflected in his female characters, as Shakespeare matured, fell in love and experienced loss. His understanding and empathy, she believes, was shaped by his own experience as an actor, which afforded him “a whole knowing of body, mind, spirit, and sound.” The young writer who created the volatile, ultimately submissive Kate in Taming of the Shrew had a far different understanding of women’s desires, sexuality and craving for power than the older playwright who created the complex Desdemona, Cleopatra and Gertrude. From the Dark Lady addressed in his sonnets, writes Packer, he developed an uncommon empathy and was “able to understand the bind that an intelligent, creative, sexually desirous woman was in—and he started to write in her voice.” Women, he realized, “speak the truth at their peril.” Both Desdemona and Emilia die in Othello, a play Packer thinks is more about sexism than race; Ophelia, who speaks uncomfortable truths not only about Hamlet, but the whole royal family, kills herself; Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, “dies because she is simply what she is—truthful, committed, generous, caring.” Throughout the book, Packer digresses in engaging, articulate interludes: about Shakespeare’s life between 1587 and 1594, a period crucial to his emotional development; about her visceral and intellectual response to inhabiting men’s roles; about the connection of language to the body.
A sparkling, insightful exploration of Shakespeare’s words and world.Pub Date: April 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-70039-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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