Mrs Shakespeare - Robert Nye (Mrs. Shakespeare - Robert Nye)

Name: nlingwood

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Product:	Mrs. Shakespeare - Robert Nye
Date:	01/11/00 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Shakespeare, the best bits

Disadvantages: It should be longer

The most-quoted and most famous playwright of the English language has his mysteries revealed in this hilarious and compulsive book. Robert Nye combines huge literary insight with the imagination and humour to blend it seamlessly with a lively tale of Elizabethan life. Anne Hathaway, the wife of whom little is known except for her husband's bequest, is brought to homely and vivacious life. And the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets and that bed itself are also explained.

The achievement of the story is that it works on so many levels. It is at once an unlikely romance, a glimpse of history, and a subtly crafted feast of references. For everyone who studied the plays, or saw them on the stage and screen, all the Bard's ideas and characters are given inspiration in the world Anne describes. Her honest and unflattering gaze falls most on her husband, whose feet of clay and lofty hopes are shown. From the episode of her visit to London, her throughts and the story winds out to an entire life and work.

Some cunning is also used to keep you reading enthusiastically. Just as the mystery of the bed approaches, Anne presents a recipe for Hare soup to "fortify you for what is to come". But what is most enjoyable is the human feeling of the book, a familiarity that sees weakness and vices but does not condemn. The tragedies and comedies of life are combined in a story that charms and entertains. Perhaps, as Anne claims, you might not have read Shakespeare, but part of the beauty of this book is that you hardly need to.

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