Living With
Shakespeare
edited by
Susannah Carson
ISBN:
978-0-307-74291-9
A 2013 Vintage
Original release
from Random
House. 493 pages.
A very long time
ago, my parents collaborated to make to me a gift of a beautiful book that my father
originally acquired in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1928. “The Complete Dramatic and, Poetic
Works of William Shakespeare,” was compiled and discussed by Professor
Frederick D. Losey of Harvard. The book was published in 1926 by The John C.
Winston Company of Philadelphia and Chicago. It is a beautiful leather-bound
volume of thin gilt-edged pages. The book survived our travails in Goodwell,
Oklahoma, between 1930 and 1938. I treasure and refer to it often. And I had
the great good fortune to perform a minor part in a community theater
production of “Othello,” a good many years ago.
And now there is
a companion book, about which, I cannot say enough good things. “Living With
Shakespeare,” is a series of essays from a wide array of writers, directors and
others about their lives with this astounding writer’s works. Some are funny,
some of them are irreverent. Some will engender disagreement and all will add
to our understanding of the greatest writer in the English language. Ask
yourself; how it is that 400 years after he lived, his plays are being
re-interpreted, his sonnets sung, his insights helping us to better understand
ourselves?
The book is
smoothly organized with a few fine photographs scattered throughout the
thirty-eight original essays from the likes of Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates,
Isabel Allende, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and James Earl Jones. Readers
should not neglect to read the excellent introduction by Susannah Carson. Bravo
to all the aforementioned individuals, as well as those who produced this handsome
volume. Readers should not pass by Harold Bloom’s precise and pointed Foreword
that echoes the question so often asked in literature classes, “Why
Shakespeare?” And the answer comes still, after four hundred years. “Who else
is there?” Who else, indeed.
