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The Rough Guide to Shakespeare
By Andrew Dickson
532 pages
published by Rough Guides at £14.99
Dateline: 3rd July, 2005
This book demonstrates an amazing achievement in the field of scholarship
by a man of only 25. It is hard to believe that Andrew Dickson could
have written this massive tome and completed all of the underlying reading
and watching necessary to do so in three score years and ten, let alone
little more than a third of that time, most of which he spent as a child.
There are a larger number of encyclopaedic guides to the works of William
Shakespeare and over the last year, the British Theatre Guide has featured
reviews of two worthy competitors, the compact A
Pocket Guide to Shakespeare's Plays published by Faber and Faber
and the heavily illustrated The Essential Shakespeare
Handbook from Dorling Kindersley. Each had a great deal to offer
but both are put into the shade by this unlikely competitor.
This Guide is anything but Rough, in all but its use
of contemporary language and written style to convey the joys that can
be derived from studying the plays, poetry and life of a man who many
regard as the greatest English writer (or even man) that has ever lived.
The book is split into three main section:, first it analyses each
of the 38 plays (including The Two Noble Kinsmen), then the poetry
and finally has a section entitled Contexts which primarily comprises
an essay on the playwright's life and one on theatre in his time.
For each play, there is a brief introduction, a note of date, sources
and texts and then a lengthy section entitled Interpreting the Play
in which Dickson analyses the play, usually including lengthy quotes
from the text. This is followed by a section on stage history and adaptations,
taking the story from the first known performance right up to the time
of publication.
Along the way, there is a section on major characters and synopses,
some carefully selected photos and pictures and often some article looking
at a by-way. For example, an essay entitled A Veritable Negro
has been included which sheds (dark) light on Othello. As if
this was not enough, the author also selects choice videos and DVDs,
tapes and CDs, editions of the text and critical works about the play.
The consequence is that, for students of (say) King Lear, not
only they find out what the play is about, when it has been most famously
performed and what chunks of it sound like but, in addition, they are
steered towards the best written, visual (including Akira Kurosawa's
Ran) and aural versions, and a couple of critical books to boot.
At the end of this crash course, the reader will inevitably be an expert
on the subject or at least sound as if he or she is.
The sonnets and longer poems get similar treatment, once again with
extracts to illuminate the explanations.
Dickson starts the biographical section by explaining that little is
known of Shakespeare's life. To be fair, his overview does little more
than prove his point, as the few facts are marshalled and supplemented
by much surmise to try and present a picture of an almost invisible
man. The question of Who Wrote Shakespeare? is also addressed.
Andrew Dickson is always willing to be opinionated and uses a very
relaxed, modern style throughout. This may not appeal to his more strait-laced
readers but his goal and that of the publishers must surely have been
to bring a new generation to Shakespeare. There is little doubt that
this book will have made a significant contribution towards it.
Philip Fisher
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