Customer Reviews

Brush Up Your Shakespeare!

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This short little tome is a wonderful and welcome addition to the body of literature that reviews and analyzes the Bard's work. It is not a deep analysis, by any means. But it makes a nice read in the sub-catagory of Shakespearean trivia. The book lists dozens of phrases common to our language, and gives a quick review of the quip's context in the play, followed by a critique of the modern usage of the same. A fun tribute to the continuing legacy of Bard's body of work.

This book proves it: William Shakespeare was a brilliant man. I'm a huge Shakespeare fan and I'd love to get the chance to meet Macrone. Brush Up Your Shakespeare is intelligently divided into sub sections including Famous Quotes, Words Coined by the Bard, Words often misattributed to Shakespeare, and Titles Borrowed From Shakespeare. Not only is this book easy to read, it also is concise. It's great for a student who's just curious to learn a little more about Will, who doesn't have the time to pore over hundreds of research papers on him. It was also extremely interesting to me (a Linguistics minor) because of all the lexicography. A great book to own--at a reasonable price!

I didn't expect my book can be shipped in such a short time!!it's nice to receive the book in such a good condition too. I will definitely continue to purchase in Amazon if necessary.

This book is a great introduction to various plays of Shakespeare. Each couple of pages consists, first of a few lines of a play or sonnet, and then a few paragraphs describing the context of the scene and play, and then the meaning of the particular Elizabethan wordings and expressions. I found it took some concentrative reading that I normally do not use in reading and it conveyed some truly valuable gems of insight.

For instance on from pages 152 to 157 consisted of various Buddhistic teachings I have read from the East such as page 152, "That Within which Passes Show," - Hamlet, Act I, scene I, observes the insight of an inner self within us that surpasses the transient show of our physical lives, the silent observer. And this is why Shakespeare could say that "All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts." - As You Like it. To be human one must play the many roles, as the world is the stage, while within there is a self that surpasses show.

"There are many more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio", Hamlet, Act 1, theres the world of symbols (Jung), mantras, metaphor, quantum, and spiritual, all beyond science and philosophical discursive reasonings and university education, like Marlowe and Goethe's Doctor Faustus consulting a ghost, a demonic spirit.

"Thinking too precisely on the event" from Hamlet is letting go in thinking, that is, first steering the ship, but then ceasing in thoughts to rest in mindfulness, where you become one with the object where all conscious deliberation, fears and anxieties cease. This particular problem of thinking is one many despots and tyrants have argued against democratic participatory deliberations and indecisiveness.

And the famous "To be or not to be" from Hamlet, can be interpreted in something as this: To live is to die in inertia and to die is to live by taking action against the weariness of life into the world of the unknown, the dangerous unknown, go there - that is living. Ah, but here's the rub (catch): That while our mortal life is turmoil, unbalance and hard in work in weariness, to journey to the unknown by dying is something permanent, and we do not know of anyone who has ever returned. And so it is our thinking minds, that which cause us to deliberate in stagnant conflicting thoughts, which causes fears, preventing us from the courage of seeking the unknown.

Ah, but I'm not trippingly on the tongue here, but can say that Prospero's words and later Bogarts, show this life, this world, are the mental catoregoriztations created by man (Kant) and maya (illusions) in which such stuff as dreams are made on and nature itself, not the elaborate teachings of man, are the sweet we find from adversity.

I enjoyed reading this book, very short, took less than an hour to read it, the author introduce the phrase in the context of the play including the passage where it's mentioned, then make a comparison between the meaning in Will's time and the meaning nowadays, also there's a nice chapter on "faux-Will", phrases that seems to be coined by the Bard but indeed were not.