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Mad About Shakespeare
- From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room
- Narrated by: Jonathan Bate
- Length: 9 hrs
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Mad About Shakespeare
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Publisher's Summary
From the acclaimed and best-selling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing your mind?
Shakespeare’s world is never too far different from our own, permeated with the same tragedies, the same existential questions and domestic worries. In this extraordinary book, Jonathan Bate brings then and now together. He investigates moments of his own life—losses and challenges—and asks whether, if you persevere with Shakespeare, he can offer a word of wisdom or a human insight for any time or any crisis. Along the way, we meet actors such as Judi Dench and Simon Callow, and writers such as Dr Johnson, John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who turned to Shakespeare in their own dark times.
This is a personal story about loss, the black dog of depression, unexpected journeys and the very human things that echo through time, resonating with us all at one point or another.
Critic Reviews
"Many of us are mad about Shakespeare, whether as audience, actor or scholar. Jonathan Bate represents us all in his enlightening, moving report of his own personal 'madness'. Reading it is an education." (Ian McKellen)
"A startlingly original journey into the soul of Shakespeare by one of his greatest living interpreters." (Sir Anthony Seldon)
"Jonathan Bate’s Mad About Shakespeare offers a series of moving lessons in the complex grammar of life. Speaking as student and teacher, son, husband, father and dramaturge, Bate produces a work of significant cultural and familial history that runs through the language and scenery of Shakespeare. Tying and untying knots, Bate asks how we might live alongside literature as a source of knowledge, comfort and hope. Shakespeare’s expansive plots and wise conceits offer extra space and time in which to live and breathe in the face of emergency; a literary bloodline offering wisdom, insight and consolation." (Sally Bayley)
What listeners say about Mad About Shakespeare
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- David
- 28-10-2023
Confused, Conflicted but insightful
this book is meant to be autobiographical but bends towards an academic study of the plays and its characters. I appreciated his insight into the plays and characters and the extent in which they influenced his life.
His chapters on Johnson's prescription are great. "A great literacy work is made up of striking images and ideas painted in evocative prose or verse..." (p.125) or "Plays are there to pose questions"(p.135) are thought provoking.
Then from chapter 10 I get lost and a little confused (The document moves in to the realm of speculation rather than fact)
He begins chapter 11 with a strident rebuttal of anyone who refutes his idea that it was a William Shakespeare of Statford. OK there are so many holes in the anti-Statfordian arguments that they are "fair Game". But then he goes to great lengths to put the argument that you can use the plays to ferret out autobiographical information about the writer. After all, he argues, there is auto graphical information in the writing of Dickens, Plath, Woolf and others. These writers have left behind documents that can be used to support this assumption. with William Shakespeare there is no such documentation or history. In short we have no information that such a person even existed,
Surely the great thing about the plays are the plays. Who wrote them is unimportant.
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