Recommendations from our site
“It’s a very lively book. It’s a novel, in a way…There’s a sense of our hero moving through time and having different adventures along the way. That’s the narrative of this book. I think Taylor is a brilliant scholar, probably one of the most brilliant Shakespearians of our time. What he’s done in this book is condense a huge amount of work into something which is readable and interesting. He shows how people just wanted different things from Shakespeare at different times. Maybe at certain times they wanted him to be more classical, at others more English and his Englishness became important. Or they wanted to argue about whether the comedies or the tragedies were better, or whether he was good at women characters or not.” Read more...
The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception
Emma Smith, Literary Scholar
Our most recommended books
-
The Mirror and the Lamp
by MH Abrams -
The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment
by Marion Milner -
On Being Ill
by Virginia Woolf -
Of Grammatology
by Jacques Derrida & translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -
De Profundis
by Oscar Wilde -
Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present
by Gary Taylor
