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Title: Shakespeare Is Hard, but So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearian Tragedy by Fintan O'Toole ISBN: 1-86207-528-X Publisher: Granta Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Not bad
Comment: This book has some valuable ideas about Shakespeare' tragedies, but its argument is crude and completely unoriginal. In addition, the author spends about half of the book setting up a strawman and then tearing it down. The strawman is that the Aristotelean concept of tragedy rules in current Shakespeare teaching and scholarship. At best, his flogging a dead horse is tedious, at worst, he displays his total ignorance of current scholarship and teaching. Other than that, this is an ok book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Breathing fresh life into Shakespeare
Comment: Although this is a reprint of his 1990 volume originally titled "No More Heroes," O'Toole's introduction to Shakespeare and his great tragedies is yet one of the most helpful retakes on why we need to return to the original plots (in both senses) of the author. O'Toole arms teachers, individual readers, and potential directors with insights that will restore excitement to the experience of Shakespeare.
O'Toole is obviously as enthusiastic about his subject as Harold Bloom is, but his writing is careful, witty, and well thought out, with specific examples to back up his "radical" guide. Even the beginning Shakespearean will easily follow O'Toole's important placement of The Plays within their Elizabethan context: a turbulent time of social upheaval and personal insecurity (easy to appreciate early in this 21st Century). More experienced readers and teachers will (hopefully) enjoy being challenged to expand the narrow boxes in which recent generations have attempted to capture Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear. The "tragic hero" and his "tragic flaw" (for example) are seen to be unnecessary distortions imposed by Victorian lenses. "See farther" - as Shakespeare might say.
You may want to quibble with some of the author's interpretations, but you'll come away respecting O'Toole's honesty and clarity, and will no doubt savor new insights into many details of the play (it was not just for show that toads, nails, and witches are included in the dramas). Both little details and long-disected classic overarching issues (e.g., "Why did Hamlet delay?") come into brighter light.
Warning to teachers: O'Toole will incite your students to think outside the boxes that have usually facilitated pat answers to essay asignments.
Eminently readable and engaging.
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Title: Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion by David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Stanley Wells ISBN: 0140291172 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322233X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad by Eva T. H. Brann ISBN: 0967967570 Publisher: Paul Dry Books Inc Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Shakespeare: For All Time by Stanley W. Wells ISBN: 0195160932 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322751X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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