After Shakespeare: An Anthology

by John Gross

No writer has served as such a powerful source of inspiration for other writers, or attracted such varied and widespread comment, as William Shakespeare. From West Side Story, Ivan Turgenev's A Lear of the Steppes , Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead to Polish poet Zbigniew
Herbert's "Elegy for Fortinbras," Shakespeare's presence in literature and theater has been powerful and pervasive.
Now, in After Shakespeare , editor John Gross brings together a lively gathering of writings that testify to that presence. More passionate and more personal than most Shakespeare criticism, these pieces reveal much more directly Shakespeare's effect on the generations of writers and thinkers
who came after him. Novelists, poets, and playwrights are all represented, as one would expect. But Shakespeare's influence extends beyond the expected to philosophers, historians, composers, film-makers, and politicians. Here we see how Shakespearean characters and motifs fueled the genius of
Goethe and Dostoevsky, Aldous Huxley and Emily Dickenson, John Updike and Duke Ellington, Marcel Proust and Grigor Kozintsev. We see Shakespeare the man firing the imaginations of Kipling, Joyce, Borges, and Burgess. Herman Melville writes a poem about Falstaff. D. H. Lawrence anatomizes Hamlet,
(revealing much about his own aesthetic in the process). R. K. Narayan describes a Shakespeare lesson in an Indian classroom. John Osborne adapts Coriolanus. Eugene Ionescu reworks Macbeth. We even see Shakespeare's power to console the lonely prisoner in the writings of Alfred Dreyfus and Nelson
Mandela.
Wide-ranging, surprising, and written with refreshing immediacy, After Shakespeare brings together a collection of writings that not only reflects Shakespeare's enduring spirit but brilliantly embodies it.

Genres: Shakespeare, Criticism

376 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

John Gross was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London, a senior book editor and book critic on the staff of The New York Times in New York, and theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph. He was also literary editor of The New Statesman and Spectator magazines.

Reviews

[Kiof]

near perfectly executes the idea (what famous people have said about the Bard), but gives you a glimpse of how idiotic criticism is. How futile are all these words of these great men. They explain nothing, illuminate nothing. Having been a lifelong reader of the stuff (criticism), I feel I'm having a conversion against it. It started after I saw the movie In Time with Justin Timberlake at an Inverness shopping mall and it was a near masterpiece. But it got 30 something on RT. As Chekhov said (paraphrasing): The Shakespeare critic would like to think he is more important than Shakespeare's work.

[William Cawley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. As interesting a source of insight into the selected authors/writers and the limitless influence Shakespeare has upon people of all ages and walks of life, as it is into Shakespeare and an understanding of his works. A wonderful, novel, and varied collection of pieces from wide and, at times, surprising, sources, all most cleverly put together and presented by the late John Gross.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

"After Shakespeare" gets five stars only because that is as high as Goodreads goes. This is a wonderful book. I assumed that like with most anthologies I would read a bit here and a bit there, maybe look up a few things but once I started I was hooked which indicates, among other things, how good an anthologist John Gross is.

[JT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing compilation of writings on and inspired by Shakespeare in the centuries since his death. Excerpts and reflections from a host of writers and critics illustrate the expansive and enduring legacy of the Bard and his work.