Product Description

'An absolute delight ... boozy, bawdy, generous-hearted ... utterly original and relishable' Sunday Times Shakespeare has always been a big part of Dominic Dromgoole's life. This is the story of how he has stumbled, shambled and occasionally glided through the years with Shakespeare as his guide - whether reading Julius Caesar aloud to cows as a boy, listening to Peter O'Toole crack dirty jokes at his parents' kitchen table, acting in car-crash student productions or putting on his own. Along the way he shows us what Shakespeare's rough-and-ready genius can teach us about love, war, sex, death, drunkenness, friendship ... and just about everything. 'Friendly, inclusive, I warmed to it immediately ... A terrific book' Evening Standard 'The book is clearly a triumph ... You laugh out loud and cringe in equal measure' Spectator 'Superb ... thrillingly entertaining ... throbs with vigour, honesty and passion' Daily Telegraph 'A record of a lifelong obsession - articulate, intelligent and passionately set down ... Dromgoole's enthusiasm has a sincerity and warmth that are infectious' Observer 'Irresistibly seductive' Independent on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #144649 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Sunday Times
Entertaining ... genuinely celebratory

Sunday Telegraph
Infectious.

Benedict Nightingale, The Times
Mixes loving yet temperate appreciation with telling and often hilarious memoir, cumulatively creating [something] refreshingly original

Customer Reviews

Devoted to the Bard
Dominic Dromgoole has spent a lifetime immersed in Shakespeare's work and life, also thanks to his actress mother and actor-director father.
His book is an impassioned account of his relationship with and devotion to the bard.If you love reading literature in order to try and make sense of life's big questions, as I do, this is definitely a book for you.
I also loved Dromgoole's self-deprecating sense of humour and his account of his journey from Stratford to London in Shakespeare's footsteps.
Highly recommended.

A Book of Two Halves
The marketing blurb on the front of this book quotes The Times as saying that it is 'hilarious', and someone else whose name escapes me, as saying that this book is to Shakespeare what Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to football.

For me anyway, this is absolute rubbish. I didn't find this at all hilarious. I don't think I cracked a smile the whole way through and I am not known for being sullen when it comes to comedy. It just isn't a funny book at all. It deals with Dromgoole's lifelong passion for Shakespeare, working in rough chronological order from his childhood with Shakespeare mad parents up to his current role as Director of the Globe. It talks of how Shakespeare helped him through some of the darkest times in his life and how it accentuated some of the more joyful times in his life, but it isn't exactly a 'my how we laughed' thing.

As for Fever Pitch, I don't get it. Hornby's work was a novel, semi-autobiographical yes, but still a novel. It had a plot and a narrative direction which helped to contextualise and shape the obsession with football. This is totally unlike that. It is a series of reminiscences linked by Shakespeare, rather than a story with allusions to football. Dromgoole's book is a thing of fragments and patches, snapshots of a life.

The book is split into two parts. The first tells his life story albeit highly selective and edited with obsessive bardic attention. The second is his account of his story of a walk he undertook from Stratford to London's Globe to retrace the steps Shakespeare may have taken. It is, for me, the saving grace of what is otherwise a wildly disappointing book. It is the closest we get to narrative, some sense of continuum and meaning in what is otherwise a scrapbook.

I had high hopes of this book. I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and have been going to the plays since I was in my early teens. I studied them at university and picked this up hoping for something more than the usual dry as dust tomes. Sadly I felt short changed and that I had less.

Dromgoole strikes me as a fairly angry man, particularly angry at those people who don't see, appreciate or direct Shakespeare the way he thinks it should be done. I happen to agree with his premise that Shakespeare wrote compassionately about man's dilemma in what was essentially a chaotic world, without providing the way, the truth and the light. A shame that Dromgoole can't take that and apply it to his own feelings about the way other people may choose to see and appreciate Shakespeare then.