Product Description

No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers as Shakespeare. No writer has attracted such widespread and varied comment. This unique anthology draws on the vast literature that plays little part in formal Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, but that shows with immediacy and passion the enormous impact Shakespeare has had on our cultural life. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented. So are philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, politicians. Shakespearean characters and motifs are shown fuelling the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickinson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Nabokov and Proust. Shakespeare the man fires the imagination of Kipling and Joyce, Borges and Anthony Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet. R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Ionescu reworks Macbeth. The choice of critical responses is equally wide-ranging. Jean-Paul Sartre proves an unexpectedly expert commentator on King Lear. Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela console themselves with Shakespeare during their imprisonment. And curiosities abound - parodies, burlesques, strange echoes and eccentricities. Throughout the book we can see Shakespeare changing lives, opening up fresh horizons and reaching out to 'the great globe itself'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #833533 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Review
"A delighful new anthology.... Gross' miscellany is of the sort that few scholars have dared undertake since the 19th century, an antidote to academic tomes that throws together extracts on Shakespeare and his plays from sources as varied as the bard's 400 years of readers. The variations are staggering, but if there's one underlying theme, it's the struggle writers have had in emerging from the shadow of Shakespeare's formidable reputation."--Johathon Keats, Salon.com
"A unique collection of quotes, excerpts, and poems about Shakespeare and his oeuvre as evidence of Shakespeare's extensive cultural influence.... No other book takes this approach to Shakespeare's cultural influence."--Library Journal

Evening Standard, April 22, 2002
wonderful . . . illuminating . . .It is absolutely splendid.

The Independent, April 23, 2002
There is plenty to savour.