William Shakespeare : The Man Behind the Genius

Rating:
Summary: Shoddy and Amateurish
Review: Anthony Holden's "biography", if you can call it that, of William Shakespeare is so unbelievably shoddy, that it is surprising that it has been published by a reputable house. It is also sloppy, speculative, and downright unnecessary. Holden engages in irresponsible conjectures, which he fobs off as truth, when there is in fact no evidence. He departs freely from fact, but doesn't have the decency to tell his reader when he is indulging in a flight of fancy. As Michiko Kakutani says in The New York Times, this book is best read not as a biography at all, but as a work of fiction.

It is ironic that Anthony Holden has savagely attacked J.K. Rowling, the wondrously creative author of the Harry Potter series, when his own writing is so slipshod and amateurish. Perhaps his real objection is that she's a woman, from a middle-class background at that, not an Oxford don like C. S. Lewis. He only wishes he had Ms. Rowling's creativity and vision!

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening New Shakespeare Biography
Review: Anthony Holden's biography of William Shakespeare is comprehensive and full of new and interesting information. Holden provides the best explaination, based on evidence, I have ever seen about what Shakespeare was doing during the "Lost Years" and how he came to be in London. I learned many new things from this book, and I am already well versed in Shakespeare.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening New Shakespeare Biography
Review: Anthony Holden's biography of William Shakespeare is comprehensive and full of new and interesting information. Holden provides the best explaination, based on evidence, I have ever seen about what Shakespeare was doing during the "Lost Years" and how he came to be in London. I learned many new things from this book, and I am already well versed in Shakespeare.

Rating:
Summary: Painful Reading
Review: I found the book to be extremely hard to get through, wordy and boring. The entire book focuses on direct quotations from all of Shakespeare's works with little focus as to why the quotations were included in the text. The book gives the reader little of his personal life, personality, or political views, but focuses only on hundreds of people that he knew and met throughout the years giving detailed explanations of names, and their backgrounds. I found the book to be very boring, with little content on Shakespeare as a person; the book featured only comments on his hundreds of works. If you are EXTREMELY well versed with Shakespeare's works, this is a good pick for you. If you have some to little knowledge, pick something else. For the student who needs interesting information on him as a person, choose another book. I found it to be dry, repetative and only in depth on quotations from thousands of plays.

Rating:
Summary: A Fine Popular Biography of Shakespeare
Review: In calling Holden's book a "popular" biography, I do not mean to denigrate his scholarship. Holden has done a lot of research, but he wears his learning lightly. His biography is "popular" in the best sense - gracefully written, mercifully short (300 pages), interesting, and entertaining. He neither gets bogged down in minutia, nor does he oversimplify. Some of his conclusions may be controversial (and what is not controversial, in Shakespeare studies?) but Holden gives his reasons, and generously references opposing views, so that readers can make up their own minds as to the plausibility of his deductions.

The book may be a little confusing to absolute beginners, and it might not contain enough detailed argument to satisfy academic scholars. But I would imagine that most everybody else would find in it a great deal of enjoyment, information, and interest.

Rating:
Summary: "Must" reading for anyone who's thrilled to the Bard of Avon
Review: In William Shakespeare: The Man Behind The Genius, Anthony Holden creates a fresh, vivid, informative biographical portrait of the greatest writer English literature has ever produced. Shakespeare's life story is a colorful tale, from his childhood as the son of a glove maker, a teenager who left home to join a Catholic household in the English countryside, a shotgun wedding to spinster Anne Hathaway, turning actor with a group of traveling players, moonlighting as a stable-boy and stage prompter in London, playing small parts and co-writing plays on the London stage, living in a noble household, falling in love, experiencing the pangs of sexual jealous, catching the clap, becoming a wealthy landowner, haunted by the death of his son, worrying about his daughters' future, and eventually dying from drink at the age of 52. Holden interleaves the poet's own words with the know facts of his life to create a fascinating biography told in absorbing detail and revealing a very human Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is "must" reading for anyone who has ever thrilled to the words of the Bard of Avon.

Rating:
Summary: Painful Reading
Review: Some of the other reviews incite me to add yet a few more words. Holden does NOT blur fact and fiction. He consistently lables speculation and inference, identifies sources, outlines opposing views, gives reasons for his choices, and qualifies his conclusions. His reading of the plays, while brief, reaches deeply into the heart of Shakespeare's works. This is a responsible and valuable book.

Rating:
Summary: excellent - should be on every English student's shelf
Review: Somewhat to my surprise, this is a first-rate popular biography of a genius about whom we know practically nothing. Not that this has stopped any number of amateur sleuths from the Baconians to Eric Sams from trying to find clues in the poems and plays. Holden's is by far the liveliest and most readable. He doesn't make the mistake Anthony Burgess did of spraying his own personality over Shakespeare in the usual tom-cat fashion; nor is he bonkers, excessively academic or portentous. If you want to discover as much as can be known or surmised about the Bard, especially the early years, then Holden's book is fascinating. His thesis that the SHakespeares all closet Catholics, and that the young WS was sent as a teenager to recusant Lancashire to teach at Sir Thomas Hesketh's house as good an explanation as any of how the "rude groom" acquired polish and knowledge of how aristocratic families lived. His gloss on his marriage, the untimely death of his son Hamnett and his growing interest in his daughters all substantiated by apt quotations.

A wonderful piece of detective-work. Alongside Joanthan Bates's The Genius of Shakespeare it's a great new addition to the modern enthusiast's library.

Rating:
Summary: The Essential Biography
Review: This is the essential preface to any first reading of the collected works of Shakespeare. It's the perfect introduction for the student -- and a rich summing up for an experienced reader or theater person. Despite Holden's previous oeuvre of front-table bookstore products about Prince Charles, Princess Di, Olivier, the Oscars, etc., this is a serious (though very readible) biography, which makes full use of a vast resource of scholarship. Tossing -- or, rather, kicking -- aside any nonsense about the plays and poems being the work of some mystery author, Holden presents Shakespeare's chronology with clarity, rich color and carefully examined detail. He relates the plays to what is known or can be reasonable inferred about the succeeding periods of Shakespeare's life and the developing stages of his thought. He does not idealize or fantasize. And he places the works in the context of the theatrical history of the period. The reader comes away enriched with a profound feeling for the qualities that Shakespeare's admirers so value. The plays become more accessible in the process, as does Shakespeare scholarship. A very valuable book.