John Mortimer. Will Shakespeare (1977) Supposedly written by Jack Rice, a boy actor in Shakespeare’s troupe. Well done. It covers the “lost years” of Shakespeare’s life, and provides a plausible version of Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. I would have welcomed a longer and more detailed book, but then Mortimer would have had to invent additional narrators.
The better you know Shakespeare’s plays, the more pleasure in the reading. There’s a convincing (at least while you read it) explanation of the “two loves” of the Sonnets. Mortimer knows theatre, his descriptions of Elizabethan theatre have the ring of truth. As do his accounts of the many ways which people scrabbled for a living in a time without social safety nets, when patronage was the best, if also riskiest, path to professional advancement, and sickness was likely to kill you without warning.
I enjoyed the book. The cover announces that it was made into a TV series, of which I know nothing. The book is worth looking for. ***
The TV series is available (low resolution) on Youtube.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Shakespeare: a Life
Labels:
Book review,
Fiction,
History,
Literature,
Theatre
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)
Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock...
-
John Cunningham. The Tin Star (Collier’s, December 4, 1947) The short story adapted for High Noon . As often happens, the movie retains v...
-
Noel Coward The Complete Short Stories (1985) Coward was a very clever writer. All of these stories are worth reading, but few stick ...
-
Patrick Hamilton. The Charmer (1953) Originally titled Mr Simpson and Mr Gorse , retitled and reprinted in 1989 to take advantage of t...
No comments:
Post a Comment