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Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography
Decoding Shakespeare's plays and sonnets to reveal the truth about his life
464 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2007
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78 people want to read
About the author
René Weis
12 books3 followersRené Weis is a freelance author and Professor of English at University College London. He has a written on a wide variety of subjects, including Edith Thompson (of the infamous 'Thompson and Bywaters' murder case in the 1920s), the last Cathar insurgency in the Pyrenees in the Middle Ages, and a biography of Shakespeare. As a professional Shakespearian, he has published extensively on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, his publications including editions of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Henry IV Part 2, and an Oxford World's Classics edition of the works of John Webster. A lifelong lover of opera, he also contributes regular pieces to the programmes for Royal Opera House productions.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 26, 2021
This book read like a bad Romantic hangover and too long spent in the library. While I do genuinely admire Weis' meticulous scholarship, I think that his entire project is immensely flawed. Perhaps it was foolish of me to pick this book up at all, given that I tend to balk at the very idea of a wholly biographical interpretation of the work of any great writer, but I've recently found myself surprised to enjoy Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce and Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare, so I thought I would give this work a go, and oh my goodness I wish I hadn't.
Weis' aim is, more or less, to draw attention to the parallels between Shakespeare's work and his life. Admittedly, he achieves this; whether in his names or the themes he explores, Shakespeare's work most certainly was in dialogue with his life - but I don't think that anyone would have refuted this. Of course any writer will draw on the events of their life in their work, by mere accident, if anything else. However, Weis' argument is fundamentally flawed in his attempt to suggest that this is the most interesting thing about Shakespeare's work, or that which is most worth exploring (he certainly thinks that it is, given that he wrote nearly five hundred pages on the topic) when, in reality, we gain very little as historians and markedly less as readers if we are to take this biographical approach to the work of Shakespeare. I don't think that learning that Shakespeare named a minor character after someone that he may have known, or highlighting the focus on daughters or fathers in his plays around key events in his life, does anything to enhance a literary understanding of Shakespeare's work. If anything, it limits a reader to a mere interpretation based on the events of the author's life (which, despite Weis' fantastic historical scholarship, we still know frustratingly little about). Moreover, in addition to limiting the breadth of interpretation, this method of analysis requires the reader to willingly ignore the bulk of Shakespeare's work, focusing on only minor aspects of a handful of plays rather than exploring the infinite wealth and breadth of the thirty eight or so plays that we have. In short, I think that this is an utterly foolish method of literary analysis, and, however well Weis may have drawn parallels, however meticulous and delicate his historical scholarship, I think that his work was doomed from the outset.
There has certainly been a tendency in recent years to focus on several key aspects of Shakespeare's biography - most notably the death of his son, Hamnet - as a sort of gimmicky way to understand his plays. Look no further than Brannagh's film 'All is true', or Maggie O'Farrell's enormously successful 'Hamnet' for evidence of this recent craze. The reality, however, is that this simply isn't the most interesting or fruitful way to go about literary analysis, however satisfying it may be to find these seemingly invaluable parallels between the world of reality and that of the stage.
As always with this sort of book, I enjoyed reading it in that I will enjoy reading almost anything about Shakespeare, or the late sixteenth century, but intellectually I gained very little (if anything) from it.
Weis' aim is, more or less, to draw attention to the parallels between Shakespeare's work and his life. Admittedly, he achieves this; whether in his names or the themes he explores, Shakespeare's work most certainly was in dialogue with his life - but I don't think that anyone would have refuted this. Of course any writer will draw on the events of their life in their work, by mere accident, if anything else. However, Weis' argument is fundamentally flawed in his attempt to suggest that this is the most interesting thing about Shakespeare's work, or that which is most worth exploring (he certainly thinks that it is, given that he wrote nearly five hundred pages on the topic) when, in reality, we gain very little as historians and markedly less as readers if we are to take this biographical approach to the work of Shakespeare. I don't think that learning that Shakespeare named a minor character after someone that he may have known, or highlighting the focus on daughters or fathers in his plays around key events in his life, does anything to enhance a literary understanding of Shakespeare's work. If anything, it limits a reader to a mere interpretation based on the events of the author's life (which, despite Weis' fantastic historical scholarship, we still know frustratingly little about). Moreover, in addition to limiting the breadth of interpretation, this method of analysis requires the reader to willingly ignore the bulk of Shakespeare's work, focusing on only minor aspects of a handful of plays rather than exploring the infinite wealth and breadth of the thirty eight or so plays that we have. In short, I think that this is an utterly foolish method of literary analysis, and, however well Weis may have drawn parallels, however meticulous and delicate his historical scholarship, I think that his work was doomed from the outset.
There has certainly been a tendency in recent years to focus on several key aspects of Shakespeare's biography - most notably the death of his son, Hamnet - as a sort of gimmicky way to understand his plays. Look no further than Brannagh's film 'All is true', or Maggie O'Farrell's enormously successful 'Hamnet' for evidence of this recent craze. The reality, however, is that this simply isn't the most interesting or fruitful way to go about literary analysis, however satisfying it may be to find these seemingly invaluable parallels between the world of reality and that of the stage.
As always with this sort of book, I enjoyed reading it in that I will enjoy reading almost anything about Shakespeare, or the late sixteenth century, but intellectually I gained very little (if anything) from it.
July 20, 2021
This book promises more than it delivers. Weis exhibits a vast knowledge of Shakespeare's time, Shakespeare's life itself, and the lives of his contemporaries. As such, it is very informative as well as provocative.
The issue I have is with what Weis deems the "decoding". The book is extremely suppositional. Weis goes through Shakespeare's life and times, and relates themes in the plays to relatively concurrent events in the author's experience. To a certain extent this is natural - what better source for material would there be other than the issues of one's own life? What is not natural is the high correspondence between the plays and the author's life that Weis seems to assume.
The decoding that is done within the book is an attempt to read Shakespeare through his plays, and this feels inherently flawed. One does not do this through Tolkien's plots, so why should this work with Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare lame? The author believes so, as evidenced by the many references to lameness that appear in his works. Another example: Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus in the same period in which his own mother died, but to assume that this informs us about Shakespeare's relationship with his own mother is silliness.
To be fair, the author knows that the book has many leaps of intuition within it. The language of the book contains innumerable phrases like 'surely it must be', 'it could only be that', etc. Weis also acknowledges many times in the book that there is much unknown still about Shakespeare and his life.
This book should be approached as a 'possible life of Shakespeare', based upon the idea that the playwright used his own life's as a foundational source for his dramatic material.
The issue I have is with what Weis deems the "decoding". The book is extremely suppositional. Weis goes through Shakespeare's life and times, and relates themes in the plays to relatively concurrent events in the author's experience. To a certain extent this is natural - what better source for material would there be other than the issues of one's own life? What is not natural is the high correspondence between the plays and the author's life that Weis seems to assume.
The decoding that is done within the book is an attempt to read Shakespeare through his plays, and this feels inherently flawed. One does not do this through Tolkien's plots, so why should this work with Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare lame? The author believes so, as evidenced by the many references to lameness that appear in his works. Another example: Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus in the same period in which his own mother died, but to assume that this informs us about Shakespeare's relationship with his own mother is silliness.
To be fair, the author knows that the book has many leaps of intuition within it. The language of the book contains innumerable phrases like 'surely it must be', 'it could only be that', etc. Weis also acknowledges many times in the book that there is much unknown still about Shakespeare and his life.
This book should be approached as a 'possible life of Shakespeare', based upon the idea that the playwright used his own life's as a foundational source for his dramatic material.
May 14, 2015
A stunning and profound biography of the world's greatest writer. It makes a firm case that Shakespeare was no more able to segregate himself from his humanity than any of us. His plays and poetry become even more beautiful and powerful given Weis's striking and adept scholarship. A joy to read for lovers of Shakespeare and accessible to anyone interested in how a great artist might create great art.
October 2, 2011
Just started for class...let's see how it goes
***
So as I've just finished it, I'm happy to say that I'm a little bit awed and humbled at my own humanity.
This is to do more with Shakespeare as a presence more fully realized than I had previously known him to be. I'm not an expert but I do definitely pay homage to the Bard- best writer ever? Do we need these categories? No! Is he anyway? Why not?
Weis writes well, and his effort here is well-done. The existential rumination is more modestly a tribute to his articulate, measured, thorough and edifying prose. He clearly has done the work, has a deep love for the texts, and has certainly achieved a distinct image of Shakespeare which he applies honestly, if not always definitively, to his limning of the man from Stratford.
It's more that it's nice to know that William Shakespeare was, after all, a man living and breathing, eating and drinking, fucking and sorrowing, raising daughters and making deals and of course acting and writing his roles on the stage.
We get Weis' hypotheses, which don't seem totally farfetched or wishful thinking- at least, for the most part. We get the country boy with a taste for rebellion. You don't poach deer on one of the biggest estates around when merely a sprout, get caught, punished, and pen some nasty quasi-limericks in response for nothing. Not to mention knocking up a local lass 9 years your senior (what's up with the two different names on the register? An alibi? A three's company? A botch job at a shotgun marriage?) and working diligently for your possibly papist mayor father who starts strong, sags, and picks himself up within the social stratum.
All bullshit about politicization of biography and interpretation aside, Shakespeare was almost certainly bisexual. I'd heard plenty about his man crush on the Earl of Southhampton, sure, and Weis handles the issue with open eyes and a balanced approach. Poor bastard- his platonically bosom friend was the hottest chick in Queen Elizabeth's court. Weis doesn't see a consummation there, which likely accounts for the curled-page intensity of the sonnets, not to mention the longer epic poems, dedicated to his most worthy soul and his heart's inspiration. Again, sorry to see.
Even as a fan of Harold Bloom, I've never quite bought the Marlovian revisionism aspect of his creativity, and Weis makes the point clear and convincingly. The dashing, brash, cocksure, witty, anarchic, definitely (defiantly, at that!) homosexual Marlowe comes through in vibrant color. I didn't realize what a figure he cut just prior to our boy really coming on to the London literary scene: master dramatist, lyric poet, possible sabtoeur, peer and 'rival poet' to W.S. I'm a fan of his Faustus (who wouldn't be?) but now I want to read more in him- possible paper topic. We shall see. Apparently either Jude Law or Johnny Depp or both optioned a biopic of him maybe a decade ago. If there's anybody I could see playing Marlowe, it's got to be the latter. Let's hope the wave of artist biopics will work in that favor. I'm definitely a sucker for that stuff and for one would love to see it happen.
Weis even suggests that he and Shakespeare might have known the love that dare not speak its name. Damn. What a piece of poetential literary history that would be- a historical novel?
Again, the Brits make the best biographers. I don't know if its the dry punctiliousness of a socially stratified culture, centuries of a richly profound literary tradition, the looming shade of Dr. Johnson, or what but I'm definitely noticing a trend here.
Weis echoes Keats (of course, a superb reader of Shakespeare himself) in asserting that Shakespeare's art is commentary on a life lived allegorically. If that doesn't make any sense, here's Keats himself in the epigraph:
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory- and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life- a life like the scriptures, figurative- which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure- but he is not figurative- Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.
That's got plenty of dialectical meat on the bone. I also enjoy the correctness of the swipe of the arrogant George Gordon- master versifier that he was, among many other things, accurate critic of Keats he was Most. Certainly. Not. But I digress.
One of the charms of Weis' bio is that he embeds himself in the literal world Shakespeare inhabited- you get Henley Street (where he met Ms. Hathaway in first blush), the houses, the weather, the immediate and extended families. You meet the neighbors. And they are worth meeting.
It's not a novel, and it's not written novelistically, but Weis is very scrupulous about laying out the Stratfordians and the Londoners who might easily have passed the time with W.S. in a very turbulent, seethingly sectarian era of England's history. Shakespeare was very likely to have seen recusant Catholics (John Shakespeare? there was the will, the secret chamber in the house where he took communion) essentially dragged from their beds and imprisoned, or followed, profiled, and nabbed once anything potentially incriminating came to light- true or false or vendetta-friendly. While reading I found my secular self letting out the occasional low whistle over the length and breadth of Elizabethan police state gestapo tactics. John Adams was surely right when, late in life, he exasperatedly wrote to Jefferson "O what a fine world it would be, if there were no religion in it!"
Shakespeare may well have walked to work every morning with a commuter landscape of severed heads dangling from a bridge. Or witnessing grisly executions amid a cheering throng. No wonder he seemed to take the impassive route and more or less Anglicanized to get along to go along. It didn't stop him from writing Richard II, Richard III, Julius Ceasar, Macbeth, and any number of dramas which call the vagaries of power into question. It's even a little surprising he got away with it, given the volatile circumstances.
One of the things Weis does well is what every biography will enviably encounter and must achieve- making the lives of the people around the subject compelling, human, and interesting. Weis does an admirable (if occasionally too nerdy) job of exploring daring escapes from oppressive circumstances, gutsy commitment to religious/political (at long last, is there any difference?) ideals, and the circumlocutions of me and you and everyone we know...
The only real important fault is that Weis' desire to sketch his subject as completely as possible does lead him to some speculation which is dubious, admittedly addressed in the text, yet left to linger longer than necessary. He does build a bit more than he needs to on suppositions, which is probably the biographer's lament, but still...
I'm just not buying that Shakespeare slept with Jane Davenport. Ok sure he was lodging with her and her husband, she didn't exactly seem bound to him body and soul, she was hot, the Bard's possibly a bit of a player...sure, but that's all circumstantial evidence at best. The late plays sure are filled with sexual guilt and jealousy, but I haven't heard anything about his playing Iago, and if the hookup did occur there might have been more evidence of it than a close reading of the text and some local hat-hanging. This kind of shaky induction does occur throughout the text often enough to weaken Weis' generally pretty strong text/biography edifice. Lost a star in that respect.
All in all, a fine effort which has moved me. The bard may not speak yet, but as the Rolling Stones said- Don't want to walk, and talk about Jesus...I just want to see his face. Weis has given us at least an over-the-shoulder glance, and for this I bow.
***
So as I've just finished it, I'm happy to say that I'm a little bit awed and humbled at my own humanity.
This is to do more with Shakespeare as a presence more fully realized than I had previously known him to be. I'm not an expert but I do definitely pay homage to the Bard- best writer ever? Do we need these categories? No! Is he anyway? Why not?
Weis writes well, and his effort here is well-done. The existential rumination is more modestly a tribute to his articulate, measured, thorough and edifying prose. He clearly has done the work, has a deep love for the texts, and has certainly achieved a distinct image of Shakespeare which he applies honestly, if not always definitively, to his limning of the man from Stratford.
It's more that it's nice to know that William Shakespeare was, after all, a man living and breathing, eating and drinking, fucking and sorrowing, raising daughters and making deals and of course acting and writing his roles on the stage.
We get Weis' hypotheses, which don't seem totally farfetched or wishful thinking- at least, for the most part. We get the country boy with a taste for rebellion. You don't poach deer on one of the biggest estates around when merely a sprout, get caught, punished, and pen some nasty quasi-limericks in response for nothing. Not to mention knocking up a local lass 9 years your senior (what's up with the two different names on the register? An alibi? A three's company? A botch job at a shotgun marriage?) and working diligently for your possibly papist mayor father who starts strong, sags, and picks himself up within the social stratum.
All bullshit about politicization of biography and interpretation aside, Shakespeare was almost certainly bisexual. I'd heard plenty about his man crush on the Earl of Southhampton, sure, and Weis handles the issue with open eyes and a balanced approach. Poor bastard- his platonically bosom friend was the hottest chick in Queen Elizabeth's court. Weis doesn't see a consummation there, which likely accounts for the curled-page intensity of the sonnets, not to mention the longer epic poems, dedicated to his most worthy soul and his heart's inspiration. Again, sorry to see.
Even as a fan of Harold Bloom, I've never quite bought the Marlovian revisionism aspect of his creativity, and Weis makes the point clear and convincingly. The dashing, brash, cocksure, witty, anarchic, definitely (defiantly, at that!) homosexual Marlowe comes through in vibrant color. I didn't realize what a figure he cut just prior to our boy really coming on to the London literary scene: master dramatist, lyric poet, possible sabtoeur, peer and 'rival poet' to W.S. I'm a fan of his Faustus (who wouldn't be?) but now I want to read more in him- possible paper topic. We shall see. Apparently either Jude Law or Johnny Depp or both optioned a biopic of him maybe a decade ago. If there's anybody I could see playing Marlowe, it's got to be the latter. Let's hope the wave of artist biopics will work in that favor. I'm definitely a sucker for that stuff and for one would love to see it happen.
Weis even suggests that he and Shakespeare might have known the love that dare not speak its name. Damn. What a piece of poetential literary history that would be- a historical novel?
Again, the Brits make the best biographers. I don't know if its the dry punctiliousness of a socially stratified culture, centuries of a richly profound literary tradition, the looming shade of Dr. Johnson, or what but I'm definitely noticing a trend here.
Weis echoes Keats (of course, a superb reader of Shakespeare himself) in asserting that Shakespeare's art is commentary on a life lived allegorically. If that doesn't make any sense, here's Keats himself in the epigraph:
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory- and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life- a life like the scriptures, figurative- which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure- but he is not figurative- Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.
That's got plenty of dialectical meat on the bone. I also enjoy the correctness of the swipe of the arrogant George Gordon- master versifier that he was, among many other things, accurate critic of Keats he was Most. Certainly. Not. But I digress.
One of the charms of Weis' bio is that he embeds himself in the literal world Shakespeare inhabited- you get Henley Street (where he met Ms. Hathaway in first blush), the houses, the weather, the immediate and extended families. You meet the neighbors. And they are worth meeting.
It's not a novel, and it's not written novelistically, but Weis is very scrupulous about laying out the Stratfordians and the Londoners who might easily have passed the time with W.S. in a very turbulent, seethingly sectarian era of England's history. Shakespeare was very likely to have seen recusant Catholics (John Shakespeare? there was the will, the secret chamber in the house where he took communion) essentially dragged from their beds and imprisoned, or followed, profiled, and nabbed once anything potentially incriminating came to light- true or false or vendetta-friendly. While reading I found my secular self letting out the occasional low whistle over the length and breadth of Elizabethan police state gestapo tactics. John Adams was surely right when, late in life, he exasperatedly wrote to Jefferson "O what a fine world it would be, if there were no religion in it!"
Shakespeare may well have walked to work every morning with a commuter landscape of severed heads dangling from a bridge. Or witnessing grisly executions amid a cheering throng. No wonder he seemed to take the impassive route and more or less Anglicanized to get along to go along. It didn't stop him from writing Richard II, Richard III, Julius Ceasar, Macbeth, and any number of dramas which call the vagaries of power into question. It's even a little surprising he got away with it, given the volatile circumstances.
One of the things Weis does well is what every biography will enviably encounter and must achieve- making the lives of the people around the subject compelling, human, and interesting. Weis does an admirable (if occasionally too nerdy) job of exploring daring escapes from oppressive circumstances, gutsy commitment to religious/political (at long last, is there any difference?) ideals, and the circumlocutions of me and you and everyone we know...
The only real important fault is that Weis' desire to sketch his subject as completely as possible does lead him to some speculation which is dubious, admittedly addressed in the text, yet left to linger longer than necessary. He does build a bit more than he needs to on suppositions, which is probably the biographer's lament, but still...
I'm just not buying that Shakespeare slept with Jane Davenport. Ok sure he was lodging with her and her husband, she didn't exactly seem bound to him body and soul, she was hot, the Bard's possibly a bit of a player...sure, but that's all circumstantial evidence at best. The late plays sure are filled with sexual guilt and jealousy, but I haven't heard anything about his playing Iago, and if the hookup did occur there might have been more evidence of it than a close reading of the text and some local hat-hanging. This kind of shaky induction does occur throughout the text often enough to weaken Weis' generally pretty strong text/biography edifice. Lost a star in that respect.
All in all, a fine effort which has moved me. The bard may not speak yet, but as the Rolling Stones said- Don't want to walk, and talk about Jesus...I just want to see his face. Weis has given us at least an over-the-shoulder glance, and for this I bow.
August 20, 2022
I had this book on my "to read" list for possibly years, and in all honesty, perhaps no book could live up to that kind of anticipation.
The undeniable highlights in this book are the bits about Shakespeare the man. I came in as a fan and that's the tea I wanted. This was undeniably a slog though.
Readers should know though that by "Shakespeare Unbound" the author is really referring to Shakespeare's time/immediate world more than the man himself. The idea seems to be that everything concurrent with his lifetime is relevant to discuss and unpack for possible context, so there are numerous long digressions about people tangentially connected to him or even not at all, really. To tell these pieces of stories sometimes this involves jumping forward or backward in time so the reader loses a sense of a cohesive timeline for the man himself. This is doubly frustrating when in the midst of a digression we get a line dropped in passing about someone who is crucially relevant to Shakespeare himself with a "more in that later" type of note. It was borderline maddening.
Aside from the issues with flow, there are two points where I feel like there was real injustice done: the topics of Emilia Bassano and Kit Marlowe. Both cases of hugely relevant characters who were shortchanged in the book at the expense of other less connected figures.
What I *did* read about Emilia intrigued me enough to look her up, and immediately discovered that she was a writer too! A poet even! This is only very slightly mentioned very late in the book, almost in passing. She is almost exclusively discussed in her role as a mistress, though many less directly connected male figures are analyzed down to their bones. It's hard to not see this as a sexist choice.
In terms of Marlowe, much is made about his influence but while the author shows his work on his literary influence on Shakespeare he does little more than vaguely gesture at other areas. Multiple times he implies that Shakespeare and Marlowe may have had a fling or that Shakespeare at least admired him in that way. While I definitely think this could be plausible, Weis never provides any support for this. Based on the scant textual references to Marlowe I'm not even convinced of Weis's claims that he mourned his loss even though I feel like must have--as a colleague/inspiration if nothing else.
All in all I would say this is a better fit for people interested in the politics of the time more than lovers of Shakespeare himself. Even then though, for the disjointedness of the chronology I feel like I have to grade down a bit.
The undeniable highlights in this book are the bits about Shakespeare the man. I came in as a fan and that's the tea I wanted. This was undeniably a slog though.
Readers should know though that by "Shakespeare Unbound" the author is really referring to Shakespeare's time/immediate world more than the man himself. The idea seems to be that everything concurrent with his lifetime is relevant to discuss and unpack for possible context, so there are numerous long digressions about people tangentially connected to him or even not at all, really. To tell these pieces of stories sometimes this involves jumping forward or backward in time so the reader loses a sense of a cohesive timeline for the man himself. This is doubly frustrating when in the midst of a digression we get a line dropped in passing about someone who is crucially relevant to Shakespeare himself with a "more in that later" type of note. It was borderline maddening.
Aside from the issues with flow, there are two points where I feel like there was real injustice done: the topics of Emilia Bassano and Kit Marlowe. Both cases of hugely relevant characters who were shortchanged in the book at the expense of other less connected figures.
What I *did* read about Emilia intrigued me enough to look her up, and immediately discovered that she was a writer too! A poet even! This is only very slightly mentioned very late in the book, almost in passing. She is almost exclusively discussed in her role as a mistress, though many less directly connected male figures are analyzed down to their bones. It's hard to not see this as a sexist choice.
In terms of Marlowe, much is made about his influence but while the author shows his work on his literary influence on Shakespeare he does little more than vaguely gesture at other areas. Multiple times he implies that Shakespeare and Marlowe may have had a fling or that Shakespeare at least admired him in that way. While I definitely think this could be plausible, Weis never provides any support for this. Based on the scant textual references to Marlowe I'm not even convinced of Weis's claims that he mourned his loss even though I feel like must have--as a colleague/inspiration if nothing else.
All in all I would say this is a better fit for people interested in the politics of the time more than lovers of Shakespeare himself. Even then though, for the disjointedness of the chronology I feel like I have to grade down a bit.
September 17, 2017
A treasure trove of linguistic strategies to express likelihood and probability; I'm sure no other book has as many sample sentences with 'apparently', 'may', 'might', 'likely', 'probably', must have', 'would have', 'it is inconceivable that', etc. as this book has. However, the reader becomes increasingly convinced that 'Shakespeare's plays chime with details and events from his life' and that 'beneath (his) iambic pentameters the private self beats its drum with percussive ardor'. The result is that the literary god or genius, which he undoubtedly is, is enriched with a very human dimension, even if there is little or no scientific corroboration for many propositions. Still, the book is compulsory reading for anyone trying to figure out who the man Shakespeare may have been.
June 5, 2021
Excellent overview of The Bard's life, with considerable detail about his family, business, houses, work, historical records of his activities, and so on.
Weis believes the plays are, if not autobiographical, then were deeply influenced by Shakespeare's personal and private life. He thus tried to equate life events and characters with those in the plays. He succeeds only modestly and makes a few too many assumptions along those lines for my own comfort. Hence the four stars rather than five.
Still, it's a good book, rich with up-to-date historical information.
Weis believes the plays are, if not autobiographical, then were deeply influenced by Shakespeare's personal and private life. He thus tried to equate life events and characters with those in the plays. He succeeds only modestly and makes a few too many assumptions along those lines for my own comfort. Hence the four stars rather than five.
Still, it's a good book, rich with up-to-date historical information.
January 26, 2020
Shakespeare Unbound is a highly detailed biography that links the Sonnets and Plays with events from the playwright’s life in Stratford and London. The Bard had affairs, may have fathered a son out of wedlock,wrote homerotic verses about Southampton, and maintained a studied ambiguity about his religious bent ( his father died swearing allegiance to his Catholic faith). Engrossing if sometimes tedious in documenting property provenance and lineage
December 20, 2017
Not as much fun as I thought it would be. He works too hard at making connections that we don't need to make.
December 6, 2013
A thoroughly fascinating journey for anyone interested in the man behind the famous plays and sonnets. The author uses historical documents and what is known about events, locations and even other people who crossed paths with Shakespeare to fill in the gaps of what we don't know about this enigma of a man. Granted, much of it is conjecture: nothing more than a very educated guess. Yet Weis makes his arguments very convincing and even acknowledges the opposing views and competing theories along the way, often proving in the end (at least to my mind) why his view is the most logical. Although there is so much we may never know for certain about the life, both public and private, of William Shakespeare, there are new discoveries being made and more information may yet come to light. Until such time, I highly recommend Shakespeare Unbound as food for thought.
August 21, 2009
If you only read one Shakepseare biography it should not be this one. "Shakespeare Unbound" seems unfinished--it is full of conjecture with lots of "this might be based on that" and "there is no reason to believe that". Weis thinks that young Will really did poach deer from the deer park owned by Sir Thomas Lucy, even speculating on how he might have transported the carcass. He thinks Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic and a closeted but abstentious bisexual. Weis knows his subject--you could drop him in the middle of 16th century Stratford or parts of London and he could find his way around without much trouble. Unfortunately his book seems more like a very long and not always interesting list of graduate seminar topics.
June 9, 2008
It was pretty good.
July 23, 2008
A lot of interesting theorizing. A lot of stuff I already suspected but also a few suprises. If you like Shakespeare and need a bio to read for Mat's library game-- I recommend.
August 26, 2008
I was expecting each chapter to connect one of his works with his life. It turned out to be more of a biography with proofs of the connections interspersed with significant dates.
June 23, 2014
The author combines some history and references to plays with an overactive imagination. For a more accurate new historicist life of Shakespeare, I'd recommend Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World.
April 13, 2016
DNF. I could not get into it. Some points were good, but much of it was a stretch.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews