7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The dying, lusty Bard recalls his life, September 6, 2008
Rush's narrator is The Bard himself, William Shakespeare on his deathbed in Stratford in 1616, dictating his will to his lawyer and slobbering over the maid. Novelist, poet and Shakespeare scholar, Rush ("Hellfire and Herring") knows his drama, and the dying playwright's vivid remembrances are peppered with lines from his plays and allusions to their origins.
Supplying his gluttonous lawyer, Francis Collins, with food Will can no longer savor and drink he swills behind the back of his shrewish wife, Anne Hathaway ("Cold Lady Capulet. Not a complete figment of my imagination, Francis. Nothing was."), Shakespeare reflects on his 51 years. He begins with his boyhood and the horrible stories that stuck with him of witches slow roasted before ravening crowds, his father's business failure, his obsessive lust for Anne Hathaway, his early marriage, his children.
The structure - the dialogue with Francis - keeps the reader at a remove while the bard's voice brings to life the stew of Elizabethan life - waves of plague, poverty, disease-ridden whores, filth, dangerous conspiracies of religion and politics, and the theater in all its posturing, passion, art and rivalries.
And death. Lots of death, including the death of his son, Hamnet, and the murder of Christopher Marlowe. But mostly death is commonplace, brutal and ever-present. He speaks of an actor friend struck dumb by the loss of his entire family in the 1593 plague: "Give sorrow words, we urged him. The grief that will not speak whispers the o'er fraught heart and bids it break." And then he adds that the man soon remarried and had a new brood.
There's plenty of scholarship too and some of it grows didactic. In a discourse on the tragedies Will says, "I wanted to leave the audience with the feeling that everyone is guilty." And "The hero has to die - we know that....But it's the mental suffering that constitutes his real tragedy."
Rush's language throughout is intense, unsparing, poetic, lurid and too often overwrought. The bawdiness is unrelenting, coarse and finally repugnant. The graphic description of women's body parts grows numbing. And the dialogue structure, following Will's will (oh, yes, there are lots of puns) feels artificial as well as distancing.
Still, it's a monumental labor of love and scholarship. The narrator's powerful intellect and immense capacity for life comes through, drawing the reader into the tumult of Elizabethan England. And the writing, while sometimes too much, is also rich and, well, Shakespearean.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clever, Amusing, a bit Long, October 31, 2009
Essentially a long dialogue between the Bard and his lawyer during the time of writing his will. The author has embraced the period with gusto and alludes to thousands of historical references. Writing as Shakespeare is never easy, nor risk free, because of the readers expectations. Author Rush, an obvious lover of the theater life WS lived, fills in gaps with informed speculations.
It's important in a book like this to confront everyday vulgarity, but it is an error to dwell on it, which I think he does a bit. He could have sliced some repetitions and made it a shorter read. But as Mercutio says, 'tis enough; will do.
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