Stanley W. Wells

Wonderful, wonderful, and still more wonderful!

This is, for my money, the most readable, approachable, intelligent introduction to Shakespeare studies that I've yet found. Each of the book's 45 chapters is written by a different scholar, and edited by Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. Over the course of this 45 chapters, readers are given a detailed but comprehensive introduction to the headline topics. This includes Shakespeare's life from birth to death; the theatres and culture of his time; how plays were written, performed, and printed; Shakespeare's genres; close readings of several of the plays; performance practice through the ages; some of the main branches of Shakespearean criticism, ranging from post-colonial and feminist to new historicism; Shakespeare on film and in translation; and Shakespeare online. While the last of those categories is hopelessly outdated, the rest remains invaluable.

What the editors get right is that each chapter is written with a scholarly air, rather than presenting "Shakespeare for Dummies!". At the same time, I wish that some of my Penguin or Arden editions chose to include a few of these morsels. The plain-speaking explanation of the difference between iambs, trochees and spondees will be of much use to someone approaching Shakespeare with trepidation. Each chapter also includes a bibliography for suggested reading, which should be able to direct the keen reader to a wealth of knowledge.

Of course, at the end of the day, most chapters are roughly 10 pages long. This is an overview, and a ground-level one at that. But, after all, the joy of Shakespeare is in the discovery. I recommend this book to all - even if you're fairly well-read - as you'll find many avenues to explore in the future.… (més)

Just great. Stanley Wells can do no wrong, and this is yet another example. The book takes a no-nonsense approach to Shakespeare, laying out the basic facts we know about him and the theatre of his time, and then devoting much of the book to Shakespeare's afterlife. Wells regales us with stories of the actors, directors, writers, naysayers, fans, and idolaters who kept Shakespeare's name in the common mind for four hundred years. By the nature of this book, it's inevitably a surface-level tour. The book has a lengthy bibliography, as this is not attempting to be comprehensive so much as all-encompassing.

I'd say this is a worthy read for any Shakespeare fan, because it covers a different tract of the area of scholarship. This book is much more about how the public and the fans grappled with Shakespeare's works, rather than how academics did so, and for this it is highly worth reading.… (més)

I really read this in: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/30864936?book_show_action=false

As mentioned previously, my readings of the Quarto Text of King Lear have been cursed; every time I try it I get ill. The first time I got 'flu and was only able to remember the outline of the first scene in which the division of the Kingdom takes place.

The second (i.e. this) time I got a respiratory infection that lasted two weeks, which interrupted my reading and thereby weakened the drama no end. (I have learned not to try to read anything demanding serious concentration whilst ill from the first time round with the 'flu and a similar experience with Wuthering Heights and another illness.)

This disruption leads me to not really be able to assess the play all that well. Instead I rely on an outdoor amatuer production I saw a few years ago that no doubt followed the normal route of conflating the Quarto and Folio versions, then no doubt cutting for length when I say I think it's a powerful, affecting dramatic work.

This reading does confirm my view that Lear is the Old Man's Tragedy in contrast to Hamlet as the Young Man's (Adolescent's?) Tragedy. The instigating events are pretty foolish (as usual more foolish than the Fool proves to be) but they seem to be the mistakes of a person late in life wanting to simultaneously step back from power and yet retain the trappings and respect that go with it. Hamlet, on the other hand is young, inexperienced and oscillating between indecisive dithering and impetuous reaction, all the while treating others badly as he behaves in an extremely self-absorbed fashion.

That Lear misjudges his daughters to such an extent is perhaps related to Kingship and being overly used to flattery but also indicates that he doesn't have the perception to see through it. The indications are that he was competent in his younger days or at least accepted good advice, but now, as is common in people who retain positions of power for a long time, he seems to have come to believe his own hype. These things are the root of the tragedy that follows.

Lear displays many of the tropes defining Jacobean Revenge Drama, particularly gruesome bodily mutilations and an enormous body count of significant characters in the final act, but any discernible revenge element is present only in the subplot surrounding Edgar and Edmund.

As already mentioned, performances tend to conflate Quarto and Folio texts. This follows the normal practice in print editions. Here, Wells and co. have taken the unusual step of presenting each each version separately and in full, suggesting that the unusually extensive changes Shakespeare made in response to performance of the original, which go beyond simple revisions of wording to include structural changes to the play, mean that in effect the Folio version represents a "second edition" that should be judged separately and probably accurately reflects performances from about 1604 onward. Hence conflated texts, whilst not necessarily intrinsically a bad thing, are really a form of adaptation in that they do not accurately reflect any performances during Shakespeare's lifetime.

Since the curse seems to be restricted in scope, as it evidently does not affecting performance, I am hoping it also does not affect the Folio text which appears later on and I will be able to get through it without getting another infection! As it is, with 11 plays (if I re-read MacBeth, which I am increasingly tempted to do) and about 2/3 of the sonnets still to go, finishing the Complete Works this year is looking unlikely.… (més)