Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience

by David Bevington

The extended second edition of this inspiring introduction to Shakespeare offers readers more insights into what makes Shakespeare great, and why we still read and perform his works.

Genres: Shakespeare

277 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

David Bevington was an American literary scholar.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Rasley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met David Bevington when I was an undergraduate at University of Chicago. I took my seat in James Redfield's Greek reading class of Plato's Symposium, which was cross-listed as a graduate/undergraduate course. The student beside me looked way too old to be a grad student. When I came home and told my wife a really nice older guy named David Bevington was in my Greek class, she shrieked, "Don't you know who that is?!" I didn't know he was the eminent Shakespeare scholar and one of my English major wife's professors. Mr. Bevington was taking a second year Greek class to brush up his Attic Greek.

I used Bevington's "Shakespeare, The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2 ed)" to brush up my Shakespeare prior to attending the Stratford, Canada Shakespeare Festival this year. Reading the book was almost as enjoyable as attending the plays at the Festival. The book's structure follows the "Seven Ages of Man" speech by Jaques in "As You Like It". Bevington's analysis of the text and performances of the plays, Shakespeare's life, the psychological insights revealed through the plays, and Bevington's explication of Shakespeare's wisdom about the human condition are brilliant and exciting. The reader will receive a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's oeuvre along with the known facts and respected theories about the man. Bevington shares the criticism of other scholars, some orthodox and others off-the-wall. All of this information is cleverly woven into the literary structure of human development, i.e., the seven ages of man. The plays Will wrote as a young man are comedies of courtship, then in middle age he takes on the challenges of forging identity, and his final plays are about coping with anxieties about approaching death. For example, the penultimate chapter has a wonderful analysis of The Tempest relating Prospero's "epilogue" to Shakespeare's retirement from theater and coping with old age and preparation for death.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and so is theatre," Bevington claims. For theater to live, it requires an audience. Bevington reminds us that, as Shakespeare's audience, we are more alive by participating in the imagined lives on stage.

Reading the book before and during the Stratford Shakespeare Festival made the plays even more moving and life enriching.