Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Non-Fiction | 7 August 2008
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This beginner’s guide to Shakespeare reminds us that the main reason people still watch and read Shakespeare’s plays is because they identify with the characters and situations depicted in them.
Drawing on all of Shakespeare’s plays, Laurie Maguire shows how they illustrate some of life’s most familiar stories – love and obsession, parents and children, sex and politics, suffering and revenge.
The book groups the stories into five broad categories, moving from those concerned with personal identity to those dealing with romance and marriage, family life, politics, and public life. This thematic arrangement makes the plays accessible to the widest possible audience, and helps readers grasp the connection between the issues addressed by the plays and those of our own time.
Examples of the valuing
of friendship abound in Shakespeare’s work, and the best and most satisfying of
his plays show deep bonds of friendship between the leading characters.
Shakespeare’s Friends can be read in two ways. It can be used as a reference
tool for those researching one or another of the friends out of context with
the others. Or it can be read through as a connected narrative.
"Pogue has assembled information from scattered sources into a reference that
readers can use to find out what sort of company Shakespeare kept, or to
research particular people with reference to their connection with him. She
discusses them individually in sections on Stratford, London, work,
collaborators, shareholders and housekeepers, and wives." Reference &
Research Book News
