Well, yeah, there have been quite a few books that I’ve read. Began to feel like book reports were dominating the forum, though.
A notable good one was “Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar” – that one was fun. I enjoyed it for the jokes, but some of the philosophy actually managed to stick. Need to re-read it; I think more of the real stuff will stick the second time round.
Not so good was “The Book of the Courtesans.” It was good as a series of biographical essays, but they really tried to pull it into a different framework. They wrote a good book, but it wasn’t the one they said they were writing. And the little interludes between chapters were decidedly uneven.
“Maggots, Murder and Men” was good as long as it stayed on topic. Well .. good as long as it stayed on the topic that interested me. He was very direct in the beginning; this was his book, his memoirs, and when he wanted to talk about something else he was going to. So it was all expected. And some were interesting tangents, and some were not .. to me. But all the bits about forensic entymology were great. Many of the other observations were too.
So. Will in the World.
I haven’t read many Life of Shakespeare books. Say, three .. ok, maybe more .. five, tops. All that I have read have been good. This one was no exception.
It was sort of a biographical reflection – not so much a full biography, but bits and pieces of biography tied directly to bits and pieces of the plays. Well done, too; I’ve seen other attempts at this (with other authors/playwrights) that tend to draw too much inference, too straight of a line .. and this one didn’t. This one had a very nice balance.
Good stuff on King Lear (I really need to make peace with that play) and Merchant of Venice. Knowing some of the contemporary work (for example, having read the Jew of Malta) did help, I think. But there were plenty of places where I hadn’t read the other material the author referenced, and I still found it interesting.
The big aha moment for me came during Hamlet. The backdrop of Hamlet is obviously Catholic – ghost floats in from Purgatory; Hamlet can’t kill Claudius when he (Hamlet) thinks that he (Claudius) has been confessing; Ophelia’s minimal funeral (due to apparent suicide) is a huge problem for Laertes. But what never dawned on me was the religious atmosphere of the contemporary audience – Elizabethen England, where Protestantism was the name of the game and Catholics were just about on par with traitors .. the Pope having said that killing Elizabeth was a Catholic duty, after all….
I mean, I knew both things; I knew Elizabethen England was surficially calmly tolerantly Protestant but actually a seething mass of religious upheaval. And I knew that Shakespeare was part of Elizabethen England. But I never though to look at his plays, particularly plays like Hamlet were religion is so key to the motivtion of the plot, through that lens.
Interesting stuff.
Ah, my daughter, the intellectual. You remind me of my mother. You and she would have had interesting conversations.
As for your books, I always find it fascinating when you tell me about books you have been reading. When you talk about them they seem so interesting… but sadly, when i read the same sort of books, they do not hold my interest as much. I wish they did. I really wish they did……
On Will and the World, I, too, never put it together that Shakespeare lived in a time of religious upheaval, or that he lived in a time when Catholicism was decidedly not in favor. It does put a little different angle on things.