Shakespeare: A Life

Rating:
Summary: The Life and Times of Mr. William Shakespeare
Review: A great deal of Shakespeare's life appears never to have made it into the official record, and Park Honan, for all his skill as a writer, cannot change that.

What Mr. Honan does do, however, is construct in detail the setting for what facts we do know about Shakespeare's life. Even if we lack many of the basic facts of Shakespeare's boyhood, for instance, we know what Stratford was like, and we know what kind of lives boys in Stratford led. Mr. Honan lays out this setting, gives us the known facts about young Will, contents himself with making the occasional relatively safe guess, and leaves it at that.

Despite the fact that Mr. Honan's book is mostly setting, with a fairly scarce plot, it's a good read, flowing well and entertaining. Your study of Shakespeare should start here.

Rating:
Summary: A remarkable and lucid book
Review: A wonderfully written book that cuts through the myths and speculations concerning Bill's life. A view of Shakespeare's life as he lived it. As a boy, a writer, a business man. Easily the best book on the Bard.

Rating:
Summary: Not as advertised
Review: As a general reader, I found this book very disappointing. The blurb calls it a "complete, accurate . . . narrative of Shakespeare's life." There are not enough facts or continuity to call it a narrative. It's more of a web of suppositions. The logic seems to be: the plays suggest an educated man; so Shakespeare must have been educated. Some plays suggest a sensitive man; so Shakespeare must have been sensitive. There were smart people living in London at the time; so Shakespeare must have known some smart people.

As for reliability: According to the totally unsupported words of a man who lived 100 years later, Shakespeare went to a Latin Grammar school. Our author ingenously says, "we have no reason to discredit (his) words," adds an endnote which says that there was a Latin Grammar school in the county, and then writes pages and pages on what it "would have been like" to go to such a school.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent biography
Review: Honan's biography of Shakespeare is superb. The writing style is good, the research reliable, and the play reviews are appropriate. The reader ends up with a detailed knowledge of the life of the bard. That is the purpose of a biography. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent biography
Review: Honan's biography of Shakespeare is superb. The writing style is good, the research reliable, and the play reviews are appropriate. The reader ends up with a detailed knowledge of the life of the bard. That is the purpose of a biography. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The Bard of Avon and His Times...
Review: It's a trueism that Shakespeare as a living, historical figure frustratingly escapes biographers. The number of genuine contemporary documents that touch on his person and his life is surprisingly small. As a result, virtually everything "biographical" written about Shakespeare tends to be a web of guesses and gossip.

What Honan has done here is to try to steer a middle course--- he speculates and supposes, because without speculation and supposition there is no story at all to tell--- but he is careful to distinguish those points where one goes a light year beyond the documents from those points where one goes an inch beyond the document.

He also points out conceptual mistakes in previous biographies, for example the practice of commenting on the "unusualness" of some aspect of Shakespeare's domestic arrangements, without having done any research as to what "usual" arrangements at that time actually were like. Since documents from this period have come to light with increasing frequency in the past 50 years, and even in the past couple of decades, it is a bit of a paradox that we know more of Shakespeare's times now than biographers did a century after his death.

The book is gracefully and clearly written, and I found gems and enlightenment on neary every page. At present, I cannot think of any other non-scholarly biography of Shakespeare that could be recommended as highly as this one. If you are interested in the man behind the plays, this is the place to start.

Rating:
Summary: The Bard of Avon and His Times...
Review: It's a trueism that Shakespeare as a living, historical figure frustratingly escapes biographers. The number of genuine contemporary documents that touch on his person and his life is surprisingly small. As a result, virtually everything "biographical" written about Shakespeare tends to be a web of guesses and gossip.

What Honan has done here is to try to steer a middle course--- he speculates and supposes, because without speculation and supposition there is no story at all to tell--- but he is careful to distinguish those points where one goes a light year beyond the documents from those points where one goes an inch beyond the document.

He also points out conceptual mistakes in previous biographies, for example the practice of commenting on the "unusualness" of some aspect of Shakespeare's domestic arrangements, without having done any research as to what "usual" arrangements at that time actually were like. Since documents from this period have come to light with increasing frequency in the past 50 years, and even in the past couple of decades, it is a bit of a paradox that we know more of Shakespeare's times now than biographers did a century after his death.

The book is gracefully and clearly written, and I found gems and enlightenment on neary every page. At present, I cannot think of any other non-scholarly biography of Shakespeare that could be recommended as highly as this one. If you are interested in the man behind the plays, this is the place to start.

Rating:
Summary: Welcome to His World(s)
Review: Perhaps scholars on the subject of William Shakespeare have some legitimate criticisms to make of certain details and comments in Honan's book. Frankly, I couldn't care less. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, learned a great deal from it, and now plan to read or re-read other books on the same (general) subject. Given the popularity of two recent films, Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, I must assume that there are many other readers who would also appreciate having an especially well-informed, charming, and energetic companion during a journey back in time to Elizabethan England. Yes, this is a biography of Shakespeare...but more, much more.

Following a List of Illustrations (which are excellent), an Introduction, and A Note on Conventions Used in the Text, Honan divides his book into for parts:

I. A Stratford Youth

II. Actor and Poet of the London Stage

III. The Maturity of Genius

IV. The Last Phase

At this point in my brief commentary, I want to stress that Honan's writing style is semi-formal but reader-friendly. His prose shares many of the same strengths evident in the works of other authors such as Alistair Cooke, E.B. White, and Charles Kuralt.

The world in which Shakespeare lived and worked was one of the most interesting throughout human history. Honan includes a wealth of social, political, and cultural information about that age in combination with anecdotes, gossip, speculations and conjectures, correlation's between Shakespeare's works and the details in his life, etc. What were Shakespeare's probable circumstances during his childhood and youth in Stratford? What was it like to live in London, especially when that walled city was ravaged by plague? Who attended live performances? When? Where? How were those performances financed? Who was Shakespeare's competitors for recognition and reward? Why did Shakespeare eventually retire to Stratford? What are the probable circumstances of the years there prior to his death in 1616? (Cervantes died on the same day in the same year.) Honan suggests answers to these and hundreds of other questions you may also have about Shakespeare and his age.

Is this the best biography of Shakespeare written thus far? I am unqualified to respond. Is this one of the most entertaining and most informative books I have read about a major figure in the history of western civilization? You bet. It does not "read like a novel" nor was it intended to. If you desire an "easy" read on this subject, try another source (eg Shakespeare for Dummies, Chicken Soup for Elizabethans). But if you want to make that "journey" back in time and would appreciate having an erudite, charming companion while you explore the many worlds in which William Shakespeare lived and worked, Park Honan would be an excellent choice. What about his fee? The cost of this wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Glimpse of the "Real" Shakespeare
Review: The first bio of Shakespeare I've actually been able to finish! Honan's approach is reasonable, intelligent, and well-researched. It also happens to be quite interesting, providing not only the best and most tantalizing of the available evidence of Shakespeare's life, but also by painting a portrait of the milieu in which he lived and worked. Never before has Shakespeare's achievement seemed so towering, and yet so human. Much better by far than Bloom's bloated and self-serving paean. Although slightly marred by Honan's quirky style, and by the mysterious sudden disappearance from the narrative of Anne (Hathaway) Shakespeare before the poet's death, it nonetheless held me in thrall all weekend. I hate the phrase, but it's a definite "must-read"!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating !____A Keeper
Review: We will perhaps never be able to come across a "definitive" (in the modern sense) life of Shakespeare because of the obviously sketchy nature of the extant documents relating to his life .Realising this,Mr.Honan has done the next best thing : to fill in the bare bones of the Bard's life with information from the Elizabethan period & done it in an exquisite fashion.What we get is not what Shakespeare DID at any given point in his life but a sense of what he was MOST LIKELY DOING given the socio-cultural milieu,Elizabethan mores,surviving public documents ,comments by his contemporaries and autobiographical fragments from his plays and sonnets.Mr.Honan's view is by its very nature "oblique" but given the paucity of "hard data" ,it is the wisest approach .Moreover he doesn't gloss over the gaps in our knowledge of Shakespeare's life but freely acknowledges them .Each chapter is thoroughly referenced and annotated .The picture that emerges from this account is of a remarkably sensitive genius endowed with a superlative gift for expressing the universal & the ineffable pertaining to the human condition____ in timeless prose .Interestingly ,Honan manages to do this without deifying Shakespeare ,which is wise given that Shakespeare is too fascinating a man to be 'deified away' !In the final analysis genius is always inexplicable in that it breaks the existing molds and "liberates" us to see,hear and experience the world in a novel and yet distinctly human way .This is an exquisite and enjoyable book .