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After Shakespeare

Title: After Shakespeare 

Edited by: John Gross

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2002

ISBN: 0-19-214268-2

Format: Hardback

Guideline Price: £17.99

No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers as Shakespeare, as the blurb for this book points out. Unfortunately the editor then goes on immediately to dismiss such celebrated examples as West Side Story, describing them as 'analogues rather than reworkings'. This seems a curious decision, as surely such works, drawing the most profound inspiration from Shakespeare's themes, would provide the ultimate illustration of the thesis?

We are promised insights from poets, playwrights, musicians, philosophers, historians and politicians. The list of those represented includes Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, John Updike, Alexander Pushkin, Vincent Van Gogh and Nelson Mandela. But what do they contribute? Entries fall broadly into three categories - works that develop Shakespearean characters (Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius), short stories and playlets featuring Shakespeare as a character (Rudyard Kipling's Proofs of Holy Writ, Mark Twain's 1601, or Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors) and a large body of criticism, comment and anecdote. Nelson Mandela read and appreciated Shakespeare in prison on Robben Island, apparently.

For the student or the serious Shakespeare scholar there is a wealth of material here. Certainly a lot of people have written a lot of words about Shakespeare. Poems about Ophelia, insights into Lear's troubled mind, extracts from Pepys' diary mentioning visits to the theatre to see Shakespeare plays. If you're an avid Shakespeare buff and lap up every word you can find on him, this book promises sources outside the usual canon. Otherwise it's not actually very riveting. I go with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, quoted very early in the book: What there was in the world to be done in Shakespearean has largely been done by Shakespeare.

John M Joyce

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