by John Gross (Editor)
No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers as Shakespeare. No writer has attracted such widespread and varied comment. This unique anthology draws on the vast literature that plays little part in formal Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, but that shows with immediacy and passion the enormous impact Shakespeare has had on our cultural life. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented. So are philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, politicians. Shakespearean characters and motifs are shown fuelling the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickinson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Nabokov and Proust. Shakespeare the man fires the imagination of Kipling and Joyce, Borges and Anthony Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet. R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Ionescu reworks Macbeth. The choice of critical responses is equally wide-ranging. Jean-Paul Sartre proves an unexpectedly expert commentator on King Lear. Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela console themselves with Shakespeare during their imprisonment. And curiosities abound - parodies, burlesques, strange echoes and eccentricities. Throughout the book we can see Shakespeare changing lives, opening up fresh horizons and reaching out to 'the great globe itself'.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 374
Edition: First Paperback Edition
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 24 Apr 2003
ISBN 10: 0192804723
ISBN 13: 9780192804723
A unique collection of quotes, excerpts, and poems about Shakespeare and his oeuvre as evidence of Shakespeare's extensive cultural influence.... No other book takes this approach to Shakespeare's cultural influence. --Library Journal