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The Shakespeare Diaries
By J.P. Wearing
Santa Monica Press £16 95
Dateline: 19th November, 2007
He may be in his 440s now but William Shakespeare is still as popular
as ever. Remarkably, following Christopher Rush's Will,
this is the second "new" autobiography of his that we have
reviewed in 2007 and a fourth recent publication, with another still
to come.
The author of this book, J.P.Wearing, is a professor emeritus at the
University of Arizona who has spent his life steeped in literature.
His goal, judging by the blurb on the back of the book, is both to entertain
and educate.
As a way of introducing students to William Shakespeare, this book
could be a real boon. Despite the author's use of cod Shakespearean
language, not to mention liberal quotes from the Bard himself, this
is a good read that should not put off too many younger readers, as
the works of the playwright and poet himself can with their arcane and
archaic use of the English language.
The best example of this might be in the use of the full text of certain
sonnets, the language of which contrasts greatly with the general text
of the "diaries". The downside is that the professor does
not write nearly as well as one of the greatest poets in the English
language.
Wearing has also gone to considerable trouble to cover pretty much
everything that Shakespeare has written and quite possibly a fair amount
that was loosely attributed to him. In this way, readers will get a
good overview of the works and the thought processes that might possibly
have gone into them.
They will also discover that Shakespeare spent an inordinate amount
of his time with other playwrights, first Marlowe and then Jonson and,additionally,
his sex life was varied to say the least. We all know that he slept
with his wife before they married. The affairs with Marlowe, Southampton
and other men and women have been better kept secrets until now.
The professor has also frequently been overambitious in his attempts
to get into Shakespeare's mind. In attempting to demonstrate his subject's
foresight, far too often he merely demonstrates his own hindsight, apparently
innocently introducing subjects that lo and behold are used a few pages
later in the creation of a play.
The diaries also contain some interesting if not wholly realistic criticism
of the plays. In one of the longest entries, a man who is ostensibly
Thomas Nashe analyses an early draft of The Merchant of Venice using
the kind of sensibilities that are far more 21st-century liberal American
than contemporary.
Overall, any book that makes the Shakespearean canon more accessible
is to be welcomed. While the diaries are unlikely to convince anybody
that they really reflect the thoughts of the great man, they are a good
mechanism to bring his life and writings to a wider public.
Philip Fisher
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