Customer Reviews

Shakespeare's Lives

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If you love Shakespeare, buy this book--you won't be disappointed. Schoenbaum doesn't discuss the plays, but instead the man who wrote them--or, more specifically, the differing ways that his life has been interpreted. That's right, it's a biography of Shakespeare's biographers, leading us step by step through several centuries of interpreters of the Bard, and the various wacky ways they have interpreted his life. It might not sound compelling, but boy it is. The early portions of the book are good enough, but it really takes off when the author starts to discuss the "Baconian" heretics--authors who have argued that Francis Bacon (or some other aristocratic, and therefore supposedly more intelligent, fop) actually wrote the world's greatest plays. He wonderfully illustrates the bizarreness of the men and women who originated this fanciful claim, and explains how it has unfortunately caught on in the popular imagination. (One of the first "Baconians," the not-coincidentally named Delia Bacon, is a tragically grotesque character worthy of Shakespeare himself.) This is a hefty book that you won't finish in a single sitting, but I still highly recommend it.

This book is the most thorough book on the life of the Bard