Of course, historians and critics wish they knew much more about his life. His work was well admired in his own lifetime-Ben Jonson’s elegy proclaimed it “to be such / As neither man nor muse can praise too much”-even though the theater in his time was far from a respected literary venue. He died in 1616, likely at the age of 52 many of his plays were unpublished in book form until 1623. His plays were popular and well attended, and his theater group performed several times for King James I. We are quite sure, for example, that he grew up the son of a glove maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, married around the age of 18, and had three children before leaving around 1587 to pursue a career in London as an actor and a writer for the stage. Read more about the book on goodreads.We know more about Shakespeare (1564–1616) than about most people who died more than 400 years ago. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who stayed behind in Stratford, as proposed in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, and whom Shakespeare discovers here in bed in flagrante with Anne Hathaway.-PG She is seduced by Shakespeare’s foppish friend, patron, and occasional lover, the Earl of Southampton, catches syphilis from him, and imparts it to Shakespeare himself. Notorious Elizabethan prostitute Lucy Negro is cast as Shakespeare’s East Indian mistress, a former Muslim originally named Fatjmah, and the Dark Lady of his sonnets. Life in contemporary London is presented in vivid, lavish detail as equal parts chaotic, squalid, and spectacular. Burgess uses snippets from Shakespeare’s own plays as well as slang, some historical, some invented, to evoke Elizabethan English. Its most salient feature is the extravagant chaos of its prose, presented as Shakespeare’s own stream of consciousness the novel is written in an exuberant, head-spinning, sometimes-distracting style, modeled on Joyce’s Ulysses. This highly-fictionalized, slightly seedy pseudo-biography of Shakespeare is presented in a frame story as a bravura exposition of sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever,” etc., by a drunken professor, “Mr.
0 kommentar(er)
