Shakespeare by Anna Beer

Shakespeare Reviews

• 
  Zack Kattwinkel

  TL;DR: We know very little about the actual William Shakespeare, but you can see a humorous reimagining of him - particularly his superstar status - in
  Something Rotten!: Vocal Selections at the Little Theatre of Virginia Beach through August 14. 🎭
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  For a bit of character study back towards the end of June, I visited Hoopla Digital (subscription through my local library) to find what biographies on William Shakespeare were available as audiobooks. I found Anna Beer’s LIFE OF THE AUTHOR: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, which proved extremely engaging because of her consistent approach of “Here’s what little we know, and here is a plethora of potential implications.” One of her main theses, though, is that because of the relative lack of biological information on Shakespeare, we as a society have made a habit of assuming the plays to be “transparently autobiographical,” meaning that the ideas and situations Shakespeare’s characters find themselves mirror what was going on in his life or mind at the time. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. Overall, Beer’s biography is quite informative, and encourages us to use our imaginations to fill in the considerable blanks left in the timeline of this prolific author’s life. There are a couple times, however, where it felt like the conclusions being drawn strayed a little too far from what was really plausible.
  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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  A couple highlights and fun facts from the reading:
  👑 Many of the theatre companies at the time had a version of some sort of the
  Hamlet (or “Amleth”) story in their repertoire (think about how many different versions of
  Cinderella and
  Peter Pan there are out there). However, in the original Danish legend, Hamlet lives to the end of the story. Shakespeare had to change the ending as, following cultural norms, to depict a subject bringing down his sovereign and then being able to live to tell about it would have been a big no-no considering that the reigning monarch was always one of their most important patrons.
  ✨ Historians believe that the new Globe Theater had its first performance (
  Julius Caesar?) on Saturday, June 12, 1599, because a look into the historical astronomy and tidal patterns for that day created optimum conditions for audiences to ride boats out from London proper into the suburb where it was located. 🌊 (Yes, paper records from that time period are so sporadic that we are reduced to using backdated charts and calculations to infer what dates things might have happened.)
  📜 Though it is one of his most popular plays now, there is no written record of
  As You Like It having ever been performed live during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Additionally, Rosalind has one of the most challenging roles in the Shakespeare canon, with more lines than even some of his most well-known male heroes. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote the play, and they even began rehearsing it, but the older members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men vetoed a text that would have featured one of their boy ingénue actors so heavily?
  🕯 We tend to think of Shakespeare as a withdrawn creative, perhaps an #enneagram4, alone in his room writing (or not writing, if “Hard to be the Bard” is to be taken as historically accurate) by candlelight, but he really was a shrewd businessman: oscillating between drama and poetry as audiences could not visit theaters: they had been closed to slow the spread of plague in 1593, 1594, 1603, and 1608. He also adapted form to various venues and technology available at the time, such as how
  The Tempest was perhaps the first of his plays performed in an indoor theater.
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  For all these interesting new facts, though, this book does little (and maybe it never could) to clear up some of the biggest questions about Shakespeare: how close WERE he and his wife, Anne Hathaway? (Was leaving her the “second-best bed” in his will the metaphorical slap we like to sensationalize it into being, or was it somehow a kind and sentimental gesture?) 🛏 Was the death of his son Hamnet a big enough psychological deal to him to inspire the well-known Hamlet, or was he simply IMAGINING how one might feel? 💀 What exact sort of relationship do the dedications of his works imply? When he did collaborate with other playwrights, who was responsible for which portions of the texts that endure through to today?
  .
  Again, Anna Beer’s biography - excellently narrated in audiobook form by the straightforward, no-nonsense
  Susan Ericksen, doesn’t answer these questions, but it does give fascinating insight into the world in which “the man who created humanity” lived. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
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  #biography #drawingconclusions #inferences #EarlyModernEnglish #sonnets #closedduetoplague #LordChamberlainsMen #TheGlobe #Blackfriars #ZackReads2022 #book14of35
• 
  Lee

  This book is more of a review of scholarship on the life of Shakespeare rather than an actual biography. Beer begins by stating that many people don't think that you can write a biography of Shakespeare, that there is so little information that inevitably what you write says more about you than about Shakespeare. And then she goes and does just that.
  
  But much of what was in here is a discussion of others' scholarship. I just found it very uninteresting and uninformative, though I kept holding out hope that it would get better.
  
  Read 36%.
• 
  Rebecca Azizov

  It was a lovely telling of the author supposed life... we could see the reality that we don't really know much about William Shakespeare... but some how the author did a very good job with gauging the reader in my case the listener in the book and in the things she wanted to tell us. It was very well told and the narrator was a big plus