16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Impossible to take seriously, May 20, 2011
This review is from: How Shakespeare Changed Everything (Hardcover)
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Stephen Marche's HOW SHAKESPEARE CHANGED EVERYTHING makes some bold claims: namely, that Shakespeare changed everything, including your life, whether you know it or not. To pull that off, the reader needs to trust implicitly in the author's judgment; when that fails, you're left with a bunch of words that you don't have any real faith in. That's my main indictment against HOW SHAKESPEARE.
I'll cut to the chase and tell you the exact sentence that killed this book for me. On page 33, after recounting Paul Robeson's experiences playing Othello, Marche makes the leap that O is the first letter not just of Othello, but also O.J. and Obama. Certainly that must signify something, right? Well, according to Marche it's because the two stories are linked: the black man who kills his white wife, and the black man who is "savior of the republic" (political rhetoric that is an eyeroll itself). Exactly how they're linked, we're to guess for ourselves. To my knowledge, O.J. and Obama have never met, or had any meaningful interaction with each other.
But then, we get this gem: "If O.J. did it, which he did not, he did it just the way Othello did."
Unless Marche was the real killer, or was with O.J. that night in Brentwood, there's no possible way that he could say that O.J. didn't do it with that kind of smug self-assurance, unless he's convinced O.J. is innocent because he (Marche) believes he is. DNA evidence? Motive? Doesn't matter.
That kind of lapse in judgment makes me really wonder about Marche's scholarship. If you're willing to stake your integrity on something like O.J.'s innocence and offer no evidence to back up your claim, I have a hard time trusting you enough to let you tell me your story. If you want to say provocative stuff to hook magazine readers or to perk up sleepy undergrads, that's one thing, but you can't put material like that into a book and expect to be taken seriously.
Finally, there are a few prose issues. For a guy who makes his living writing, I'd have expected better than sentences like "Shakespeare's multitudinous effects on world history would have boggled his own capacious imagination." (xiv)
So there might be some nifty pro-Shakespeare factoids in here, but I have a hard time taking anything in this book at face value.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A padded graduate thesis, but has its uses, March 7, 2011
This review is from: How Shakespeare Changed Everything (Hardcover)
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The book covers almost no new ground, and only reaches it's relatively tiny page count by repeating ideas two or three different ways within the same paragraph, but the ground it covers - Shakespeare's impact on modern life - is worthy and as a summary on the topic, it's really quite good.
Apart from the above-mentioned repetitiousness, the writing style is fast-paced and engaging, moving from topic to topic quickly enough to keep the reader interested by not so fast that you lose track of what's going on. The book really hits its stride in the passages on Shakespeare's impact on English vocabulary and modern sexuality. The last chapter, which focuses on the questionable authorship of Shakespeare's work, is a bit of a muddle, gliding past complicated criticisms and arguments in favour of a more populist approach. Also, this last bit really doesn't fit the book's overall theme at all. I much rather would've preferred an expansion on any or all of the previous chapters than a slapdash rehash of an old argument.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What we owe to the Bard of Avon, March 10, 2011
This review is from: How Shakespeare Changed Everything (Hardcover)
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It's evident from page 1 that Stephen Marche is a great admirer of Shakespeare. How fortunate that Marche is a good enough writer himself to convey some of his own enthusiasm to his reader. How Shakespeare Changed Everything is a carefully researched compendium of ten essays, each of which describes The Bard's influence on contemporary issues. Among the topics are race, sex, adolescence, starlings (yes, the birds), history, and Shakespeare's identity. Marche contends, and makes a good case of it, that Freud developed his psycho-sexual theories as a result of Shakespeare's treatment of sex, especially Oedipal themes, in his work. By citing passages from Romeo and Juliet, Marche shows how today's concept of adolescence came about. He is convincing in his belief that John Wilkes Booth's formulated his assassination plans based upon his own experiences acting in Julius Caesar. And he includes a fascinating chapter about all the words that we use as colloquialisms today without thinking about their origins - Shakespeare is credited with coining and/or recording hundreds of them. Marche includes a humorous paragraph compiled by journalist Bernard Levin, in which strings of them are joined into a coherent paragraph.
How Shakespeare Changed Everything is a lighthearted but heartfelt homage to the greatest, most enduring writer/poet in the English language. If you're an admirer as well, you'll enjoy this little (190 pages) volume.
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