A Book of Two Halves
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The marketing blurb on the front of this book quotes The Times as saying that it is 'hilarious', and someone else whose name escapes me, as saying that this book is to Shakespeare what Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to football.
For me anyway, this is absolute rubbish. I didn't find this at all hilarious. I don't think I cracked a smile the whole way through and I am not known for being sullen when it comes to comedy. It just isn't a funny book at all. It deals with Dromgoole's lifelong passion for Shakespeare, working in rough chronological order from his childhood with Shakespeare mad parents up to his current role as Director of the Globe. It talks of how Shakespeare helped him through some of the darkest times in his life and how it accentuated some of the more joyful times in his life, but it isn't exactly a 'my how we laughed' thing.
As for Fever Pitch, I don't get it. Hornby's work was a novel, semi-autobiographical yes, but still a novel. It had a plot and a narrative direction which helped to contextualise and shape the obsession with football. This is totally unlike that. It is a series of reminiscences linked by Shakespeare, rather than a story with allusions to football. Dromgoole's book is a thing of fragments and patches, snapshots of a life.
The book is split into two parts. The first tells his life story albeit highly selective and edited with obsessive bardic attention. The second is his account of his story of a walk he undertook from Stratford to London's Globe to retrace the steps Shakespeare may have taken. It is, for me, the saving grace of what is otherwise a wildly disappointing book. It is the closest we get to narrative, some sense of continuum and meaning in what is otherwise a scrapbook.
I had high hopes of this book. I am a huge fan of Shakespeare and have been going to the plays since I was in my early teens. I studied them at university and picked this up hoping for something more than the usual dry as dust tomes. Sadly I felt short changed and that I had less.
Dromgoole strikes me as a fairly angry man, particularly angry at those people who don't see, appreciate or direct Shakespeare the way he thinks it should be done. I happen to agree with his premise that Shakespeare wrote compassionately about man's dilemma in what was essentially a chaotic world, without providing the way, the truth and the light. A shame that Dromgoole can't take that and apply it to his own feelings about the way other people may choose to see and appreciate Shakespeare then.
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Devoted to the Bard
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Dominic Dromgoole has spent a lifetime immersed in Shakespeare's work and life, also thanks to his actress mother and actor-director father.
His book is an impassioned account of his relationship with and devotion to the bard.If you love reading literature in order to try and make sense of life's big questions, as I do, this is definitely a book for you.
I also loved Dromgoole's self-deprecating sense of humour and his account of his journey from Stratford to London in Shakespeare's footsteps.
Highly recommended.
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