Nine Lives of William Shakespeare

Graham Holderness
London: Bloomsbury, 2011

This unique hybrid biography self-consciously combines fiction and historical fact, emphasizing the scarcity of hard evidence about Shakespeare’s life and the speculative nature of other, more official biographies. Holderness suggests biographers of the Bard such as Ackroyd, Bate, Greenblatt, and others end up writing autobiographies in disguise – and without apology does the same himself. Continue reading

Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions

Graham Holderness
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Renowned critic Graeme Holderness observes that we study and read Shakespeare academically not in isolation from his presence in popular culture, but within a continuum with it; and he argues for the value of writing creatively, as well as critically about Shakespeare. To this end, Holderness investigates, and then imagines fictionally, the possible performances of Hamlet and Richard II on board a ship off the coast of Africa in 1707, and writes a dramatic version of Kipling’s ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’, in which St Peter’s appreciation of Shakespeare’s work allows Shakespeare to leave Purgatory for Heaven. The short story ‘The Lonely Dragon’ mashes up Ralph Fiennes’s post-Cold War film of Coriolanus with the chariot race from Ben-Hur and the quasi-maternal relationship between Judi Dench’s M and Daniel Craig’s James Bond in Skyfall. The volume closes with meditations on Shakespeare after 9/11 and the suicide bombing of the Doha Players’ performance of Twelfth Night in Qatar. —SJJ.

The Shakespeare Notebooks

Justin Richards
New York: HarperDesign, 2014

Doctor Who, the BBC’s time travelling alien from Gallifrey, has passed through the lives of countless people during his various regenerations. In the recently discovered Notebooks Shakespeare attempted to document the appearances of the “mysterious” Doctor in his life and in his writings. Compiled in 1599 after the events surrounding the loss of Love’s labour’s won, this “book of scraps” includes early drafts of many of his plays (among them an extensive group of unused scenes from Macbeth featuring the second Doctor and his companions Jaime and Zoe), new sonnets, and other material that reveal previously unknown ties between Shakespeare and the Doctor. The Notebooks show Shakespeare as a willing intellectual partner with the Doctor, using his fleeting brushes with the Doctor for ideas and characters (even if they were ultimately excluded). -TH

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The Shakespeare Mask: A Novel

Newton Frohlich
Wellfleet, MA: Blue Bird Press, 2015

According to Edward de Vere, Will Shakespeare, is “cunning if uneducated,” selling his name to the Earl for sixty pounds, enough to buy the best house in Stratford or a coat of arms for his “Pa.” The scenes between the earl and the glover’s son communicate a social and educational chasm between them. De Vere’s character is unfailingly polite and patient, while Shakespeare is hesitant and bumptious (“Don’t have no call for kid gloves in Stratford”), which underlines Frohlich’s argument for de Vere as ‘real’ Shakespeare. According to reviews, fans of historical fiction enjoy The Shakespeare Mask as a taste of the sixteenth century, but complain that the work is didactic and the dialogue too modern. Followers of the authorship debate may be interested in how Frohlich, a former lawyer, turns the arguments in support of de Vere’s candidacy into narrative, much the way defense attorneys create narratives for juries in the attempt to create reasonable doubt. –CP

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