Customer Reviews

Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story (Vintage)

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I have greatly enjoyed this book. It is a quick and insightful read full of interesting information about the times in which Shakespeare and his contempories lived. A vivid and thoroughly enjoyable book.

The author is the general editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Sheakespeare's works and co-editor the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. So he is very steeped in the context in which Shakespeare worked and obviously dedicated to that work. Yet this book is written in a non-pedantic fashion, thankfully. It begins with two chapters about the theatrical scene at the time and the actors who were prominent on the stage. Those were a little slow, for me. Then, the book picked up speed as it began presenting short biographies of other playwrights of the time, often showing connections and shared experiences with Shakespeare, and how their work influenced or was influenced by Shakespeare, although their lives are independently interesting. These men led dicey lives given the political environment, the plague, alcohol and the disreputable image of the theater as a career. The most well known of these men were Marlowe and Ben Jonson, although I appreciated learning about the careers of John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton, with whom Shakespeare collaborated in his later years. The book's discussion of the collaborative efforts included both textual analysis of which co-author was responsible for various passages, and also sketches a rather poignant portrait of Shakespeare in his later years as it prompts speculation as to why the greatest dramatist in history shifted to the collaborative mode - was it declining physical health? Creative exhaustion? A change of public or patrons' tastes? THe book does not directly speak to those issues but definitely provokes thought on them. Also, the book implicitly makes a strong case for Shakespeare himself being the author of his own plays and not a front man for another's, as (a) the childhoods of his contemporaries all bear great similarity to his, undermining the thesis that someone with Shakespeare's background could not have acquired the requisite skills to write his greatest plays and (b) despite all the authors who crossed paths with him and might have had many reasons to reveal or hint at the inauthenticity of Shakespeare's work, there appears no hint of that in this telling.

There isn't much new research in this compact recounting of the lives of the playwrights, but it is a pleasant summer reading experience, nonetheless.