Synopses & Reviews
No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers, or attracted such varied and widespread comment, as William Shakespeare. From
West Side Story, Ivan Turgenev's
A Lear of the Steppes, Tom Stoppard's
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead to Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for Fortinbras," Shakespeare's presence in literature and theater has been powerful and pervasive.
Now, in After Shakespeare, editor John Gross brings together a lively gathering of writings that testify to that presence. More passionate and more personal than most Shakespeare criticism, these pieces reveal much more directly Shakespeare's effect on the generations of writers and thinkers who came after him. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented, as one would expect. But Shakespeare's influence extends beyond the expected to philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, and politicians. Here we see how Shakespearean characters and motifs fueled the genius of Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickenson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Marcel Proust and Grigor Kozintsev. We see Shakespeare the man firing the imaginations of Kipling, Joyce, Borges, and Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet, revealing much about his own aesthetic in the process. R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Eugene Ionescu reworks Macbeth. We even see Shakespeare's power to console the lonely prisoner in the writings of Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson Mandela.
Wide-ranging, surprising, and written with refreshing immediacy, After Shakespeare brings together a collection of writings that not only reflects Shakespeare's enduring spirit but brilliantly embodies it.
Review
"John Gross' delightful 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." Jonathon Keats, Salon.com (read the entire Salon review)
Review
"After Shakespeare is not only a good idea...it is also extremely well-executed....After Shakespeare has the cardinal virtue of bringing us back to the work. It's good to be reminded afresh of his mythic genius and his extraordinary capacity for the delineation of character in a few simple strokes." Robert McCrum, The Guardian
Review
"After Shakespeare is a wonderful idea thoughtfully executed, a book to spend hours browsing through or studying." The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
John Gross is the author of
The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) and editor of
The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1983), and
The Oxford Book of Essays (1999), among other publications. He was editor of the
Times Literary Supplement from 1974 to 1981, and is currently theatre critic of the
Sunday Telegraph. He lives in England.
Table of Contents
Introduction
By Way of a Prologue 3
The Man and the Legend 5
The Poet 23
The Making of a Reputation 29
Worlds Elsewhere 43
Echoes 95
In the Shadow of History 110
Early Encounters 144
A Variety of Views 154
Among Novelists 173
Plays and Characters 196
Fictions 1: Tales of Shakespeare 238
Fictions 2: Tales from Shakespeare 277
Offshoots and Adaptations 295
In the Margin 322
By Way of an Afterword 343
Acknowledgements 345
Index of Plays and Characters 355
Index of Authors 357