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harvio's review against another edition
4.0
- I enjoyed this collection of essays, and book-long debate, regarding the verification of this 'found' portrait of Shakespeare.
- book quotes:
- "Why should the 'discovery' of what might be a portrait of William Shakespeare make it to the front page of the newspapers? Because, the answer will come, Shakespeare was the greatest writer in the history of the world."
- "After God," proclaimed Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author "Shakespeare created most."
- "...the mythic and legendary nature of Shakespeare's narratives, the richness and density of his work, the self-sufficiency of his dramatic structures, his plays' susceptibility to cultural translation, and his theatrical openness. It is needless to say that he portrays situations that affect us all, both personally and politically, that he creates - or gives his actors the stimulus to represent - characters in whom we can believe, that he deals with fundamental human concerns - love and marriage, birth and death, relationships between levels of society, the need for good government on a personal and a national level. Many other dramatists do these things too, but Shakespeare is concerned not only with human beings in society, but also with our place in the universe. He is, in the most important sense of the word, a religious dramatist - not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things, of humankind's' need to seek, however unavailingly, for an understanding of how we came to be on earth and how we should conduct ourselves now we are here."
- book quotes:
- "Why should the 'discovery' of what might be a portrait of William Shakespeare make it to the front page of the newspapers? Because, the answer will come, Shakespeare was the greatest writer in the history of the world."
- "After God," proclaimed Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author "Shakespeare created most."
- "...the mythic and legendary nature of Shakespeare's narratives, the richness and density of his work, the self-sufficiency of his dramatic structures, his plays' susceptibility to cultural translation, and his theatrical openness. It is needless to say that he portrays situations that affect us all, both personally and politically, that he creates - or gives his actors the stimulus to represent - characters in whom we can believe, that he deals with fundamental human concerns - love and marriage, birth and death, relationships between levels of society, the need for good government on a personal and a national level. Many other dramatists do these things too, but Shakespeare is concerned not only with human beings in society, but also with our place in the universe. He is, in the most important sense of the word, a religious dramatist - not a proponent of any particular religion, but a writer who is aware, and makes his spectators aware, of the mystery of things, of humankind's' need to seek, however unavailingly, for an understanding of how we came to be on earth and how we should conduct ourselves now we are here."
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