A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.
Massive biography of the Bard creates as many myths as it debunks.
Any who harbor doubts as to creativity’s vital role in scholarly work need look no further than here. Weis (English/University College, London; The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 2001, etc.) uncorks great casks of knowledge about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare’s oeuvre to animate the Bard’s rich life and times. To reconstruct—some would say, construct—this life about which so little is known, he sets biographical criticism on its ear by attempting to exhume otherwise hidden events in Shakespeare’s life from his work, while simultaneously using known historical occurrences to inform critical readings of the texts. “The plays and poems contain important clues to Shakespeare’s inner life and to real, tangible, external events he experienced,” Weis writes. “There is a cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence that demonstrates beyond doubt that Shakespeare responded in his work to key events of his life….to disembody the plays and poems from the life of their author is as counterintuitive as seeking to separate him from the national history of his era.” The author’s impassioned investigations lead him to advance all kinds of qualified theories, often preceded by the words ‘might,’ ‘may have,’ ‘probably,’ ‘almost certainly,’ ‘must have,’ etc. For instance: The sonnets’ fair youth, dark lady and rival poet were, respectively, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Emilia Bassano, daughter of a court musician; and Christopher Marlowe, with whom Shakespeare may have had a physical relationship. Also: The glover’s son from Stratford was a poacher, father of dramatist William Davenant and, perhaps most intriguingly, lame. (The possible causes of his limp occupy nearly an entire chapter.) Alongside these speculative conclusions, Weis provides engaging historical commentary on the period.
A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7501-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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