This is not the first time genre has been used as a critical tool for understanding Shakespeare’s process and plays, but Sheldrake – never one to dismiss an idea merely because it has been heard before – draws together some big ideas about comedy and tragedy and shows the way that Shakespeare messes about with them.
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In a new Book Review format designed to highlight a few critical classics to add to the shelves, Sheldrake outlines the relative merits of Professor Jonathan Bate’s acclaimed 1997 book The Genius of Shakespeare.
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Shakespeare nicked stuff from everywhere; prose narratives, history books, other plays. Sheldrake rattles through a few of the old chestnuts and a few of the lesser-known borrowings, showing Shakespeare as a great adapter of stories.
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Testing the patience of listeners once again by talking about someone who isn’t Shakespeare, Sheldrake investigates the peculiar career of John Marston; satirist, dramatist, tragicomedian. He had some great successes, then there was a bit of a lean patch, then he appears to have thrown in the towel. Why? In one word – tragicomedy.
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Sheldrake decides to put his money where his mouth is regarding Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Why should we care about Marlowe, both on his own terms and in relation to Shakespeare?
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The soliloquy is one of Shakespeare’s most recognisable and distinctive theatrical devices. It is in no small part responsible for his fame as a dramatist of human psychology. Was Julius Caesar the gateway in Shakespeare’s soliloquising art between the 1590s and the 1600s? Sheldrake takes a close look at a few speeches from the play.
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How do we know when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays? Well, there are several methods of dating a play. Sheldrake rattles through them, taking in a couple of 1590s Michael Billingtons along the way.
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Shakespeare’s Sonnets are things you nearly always read alone. But there is a rich seam of drama and conversation to be mined from them, as Sheldrake found recently when he saw them read aloud at the Royal Festival Hall.
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The poetry of Shakespeare tends to be an “also-ran” in his canon, but Venus and Adonis tells us as much about his development and abilities as any of the plays.
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If you think Shakespeare was a purely natural genius, the words spilling out from a free spirit of a mind, think again. Shakespeare’s rigorous education at school primed him in all sorts of crucial ways for his later career. Sheldrake explains how at breakneck speed.
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Henry VIII is a little known play, but it bears witness to John Fletcher’s apprenticeship to William Shakespeare. And perhaps it’s not that bad a play after all.
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Sheldrake on Shakespeare 