Synopses & Reviews
In
Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University gives us a magisterial work of criticism, authoritative and engaging, based on her hugely popular lecture courses at Yale and Harvard over the past thirty years. Richly informed by Shakespearean scholarship of the latter half of the twentieth century, this book offers passionate and revealing readings of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays, in chronological sequence, from
The Two Gentlemen of Verona to
The Two Noble Kinsmen. With erudition lightly carried, Garber illumines the overarching patterns and lush details of the plays, closely attentive to what matters most in Shakespeare: language, theme, plot, and character.
Here are fresh meditations on plays we have come to know and love, such as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest, and fruitful engagements with others not often read or produced Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3; The Merry Wives of Windsor; King John; Timon of Athens; Pericles; and Cymbeline. Garber affords us a rare chance to trace Shakespeare's stylistic development as a writer of verse and prose, an artful designer of dramatic scenarios and revelations, a masterly sketcher of woman and man, and a keen observer of society high and low.
Complete with a comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare's life and times and an extensive bibliography, Shakespeare After All is a landmark work that enlarges our understanding of the most celebrated writer of all time.
Review
"Shakespeare After All is, in many ways, a return to the times when the critic's primary function was as an enthusiast, to open up the glories of the written work for the reader." Dinitia Smith, The New York Times
Synopsis
After decades in which the study of Shakespeare has splintered into a multiplicity of academic approaches, Marjorie Garber one of our most highly respected scholars and cultural critics returns to the rich details of language and character and the overarching themes of the plays themselves. She pays particular attention to such recurrent motifs as the function of the soliloquy, the relationship between fathers and sons, the tensions between generations, the interplay of comedy and tragedy, the twinning of love and war, and the echoes of mythology.
Presenting the plays in chronological sequence, Garber allows the reader to follow the master's stylistic development as a writer, as a keen observer of both high and low society, and as an artful designer of dramatic scenarios and revelations. Chapters on Shakespeare's world and stage, an extended critical bibliography, and a comprehensive index round out this brilliant, authoritative, and eminently readable study. It will prove invaluable to all readers both aficionados and neophytes of the Bard.
About the Author
Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts.