A thoughtful portrait of Shakespeare’s sexuality and its effect on his literary output.
Was Shakespeare queer? A researcher makes the case.
Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, insists that the Bard was “a queer artist who drew on his society’s complex understanding of same-sex desire to create some of the richest relationships in literature.” Tosh, who uses the term queer because it “encapsulates far more than it excludes,” bemoans the determination of others “to scrub away any signs of homoeroticism” in Shakespeare’s work, from the sanitizing of relationships like that of Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet to the “pathbreaking sonnets of queer desire” that are often read aloud at opposite-sex weddings, “dusted off, de-queered and put to safely straight use.” The author presents a vigorous argument for Shakespeare as “one of our most prolific poets of queer love.” He charts his subject’s maturation as an artist, from his upbringing to his literary apprenticeship in London, “the default capital of homoerotic desire,” to the influence of such figures as the “sexy iconoclast” Christopher Marlowe, whose Edward II, “a study of queer kingship,” had “a transformative effect on the way Shakespeare wrote history plays” and gave Shakespeare “a queer dramaturgy that took seriously the range of ways in which a person might love.” Speculative vignettes at the beginning of each chapter that muse upon Shakespeare’s “artistic evolution” add little, and Tosh tries too hard to be poetic (“The people in a young man’s life were lacquered with a sort of pious sealant”) and funny (The Affectionate Shepherd, a work of romantic literature, was a “supersized” version of Virgil’s second Eclogue, “in every respect bigger, longer and uncut”). Still, this is a lively analysis of Shakespeare’s life and work, with close readings of his plays and claims that will likely spark fresh debate.
A thoughtful portrait of Shakespeare’s sexuality and its effect on his literary output.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781541602670
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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