After Shakespeare: An Anthology

By John Gross

Book Overview

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
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192804723
• ISBN13: 9780192804723
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.1" x 1.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Speaking of Shakespeare

John Gross, who edited _The Oxford Book of Aphorisms_ twenty years ago, has revived the idea behind the _Shakespeare Allusion Book_. That book compiled quotations about Shakespeare and his works in literature from 1591 to 1700. _After Shakespeare_ also reaches back into Shakespeare's era, and is arranged differently, but it still makes a good bookend for the earlier book. The book is arranged into chapters of quotations about Shakespeare himself, his plays, his poetry, his influence in foreign lands, his appearance in novels, plays, movies, and adaptations of his works. There is considerable overlap, as many of these divisions are quite subjective. And the collection isn't all quips; there are lengthy excerpts of plays, novels, and essays. The quotes that appeal to me are the pithiest ones, however. King George III is recorded in a courtier's diary as complaining how rubbishy much of Shakespeare is, though one musn't say so. William Hazlitt contrasts the greatness of the Bard's work with the teeming insignificance of the critical writings that sprung up about him. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg marvels at how Shakespeare uses remarkable turns of phrase, which other writers would highlight, as throwaway lines.But there's doubtless treasure in every chapter here for any Shakespeare lover. A fine, fun collection by a great, erudite anthologist.