A review by sindri_inn_arsaeli
The Quest for Shakespeare by Joseph Pearce

informative medium-paced

3.0

Interesting historical context, but this felt like reading a college essay stretched out to 200 pages. A significant amount of repetition, overly emotional revulsion of other readings of Shakespeare, (boy does the author HATE post-modernists..), and a lot of writing that makes it seem like the author is both trying to stretch a word count, and trying to sound more profound to impress the audience. He often doubles up on his adjectives for a sentence with two similar enough words that he really should have just picked one. Used sparingly, the technique stresses a single sentence it's used in, but used too much it sounds pretentious. I found three examples in a single two page spread: "Encompass and encapsulate,” "Salient and sapient," "The limit and the summit". An interesting enough topic, but not very grippingly written.