A Bard-acious Book
What a nice present for William Shakespeare in honor of his 440th birthday. Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding have created a book about him that has 480 stunning-looking, wonderfully informative pages that makes for a great read,
too.
Essential Shakespeare Handbook (DK Books; $25) starts with three essays, each seven pages in length — the first on “The Life of William Shakespeare,” the second on “Shakespeare in His Time,” and the third, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Theater” — none of which contains a word that he might have never existed. (The authors save that allegation for a four-paragraph piece on page 36.) The essays contain information that Shakespeare’s will included the line, “I give unto my wife my second-best bed,” the names of the five foreign monarchs who proposed to Queen Elizabeth I (for all the good it did them), and that between 1642, when the Puritan decided that plays were sinful, and 1660, when the new powers that be decided they were not, every theater from Shakespeare’s day had been razed.
On virtually every page, there’s some artwork. We’ve heard that Christopher Marlowe died much too young, but the picture of his cherubic face sure underlines that. There’s a full-page (5½-by-8 inches) picture of the current Globe Theater during a performance, and a small reproduction of the first page of the First Folio. Most of the pictures are in color, and the tinting is glorious.
In the next section, “Shakespeare’s Canon,” one of the book’s many timelines shows that for the 1589-90 season, the Bard made his debut with Henry VI, Part One, then lists chronologically all the plays to 1614, when he
co-authored The Two Noble Kinsmen. Then there’s a treatise on “Shakespeare’s Language,” which includes some of the words he introduced into the English language (“cater,” “drug,” and “gossip” among them), as well as the
famous expressions he whipped up, from “My own flesh and blood” to “Too much of a good thing,” and including “What the dickens” — letting us know that that quip has nothing to do with the guy who wrote the source material for
Pickwick or Oliver!.
Then we come to the main event: Synopses of each of the 39 plays, listed in the order each was written in the genre, with each sub-division colored coded. So there are 11 Histories (in green), 13 Comedies (blue), 10 Tragedies (magenta), and, in a departure, five plays usually put in the latter two categories, this time listed as Romances (violet). (They, for the record, are Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.) There’s also a section on the four narrative poems, the sonnets, and other lyric poems, for those who are interested in that sort of thing.
Each play also has a timeline showing when it was written as compared to the first and final ones, but, much more intriguingly, underneath that is another couple of lines that illustrate the length of each play. For example, Troilus and Cressida comes in at 3,486 lines, and that’s shown in relation to the shortest play (The
Comedy of Errors at 1,786 lines) and the longest one (Hamlet, as you might have guessed, at 4,024 lines). Lines are very much on the minds of authors Dunton-Downer and Riding, as is evidenced by the chart they’ve made of each play, telling how many lines most every character has. Who has the most in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream? Puck? No, he’s got 209. One of the lovers? Well, Helena has the most among them, with 229, but Bottom has the most of any
character with 261. (When you think of it, that would greatly please the guy, for you’ll recall that he does try to hog every role in Pyramus and Thisbe.) There’s a breakdown of lines per play (Much Ado about Nothing has 384 in Act One, 644 in Act Two, 547 in Act Three, 416 in Act Four, and 590 in Act Five.) There’s also a graph that shows the comparison of prose to verse (The Merry
Wives of Windsor weighs in at 87% prose, and 13% verse.)
These pages contain many photos of stars and lesser luminaries in various roles. There’s Peggy Ashcroft as the Countess of Rossillion in All’s Well That Ends Well, looking as if she’s just endured the follies of the youthful characters, and is ready to come out with, “Oh, to be young again!” And speaking of youth, there’s an early-in-her-career picture of the fetching Emma Thompson as Katherine in Henry V. For The Taming of the Shrew, in the section “Beyond the Play” (which each of the 39 works has), there’s a picture of the 1929 movie version with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; then one of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the 1966 remake; and — as you may have inferred, the one I was
looking for — one from Kiss Me, Kate. Other musical versions are cited, too, such as West Side Story (with a miniature version of a three-sheet), and a slide from Two Gentlemen of Verona: “The New York Shakespeare Festival’s free-swinging adaptation was named Musical of the Year in 1971. (Well, not by everyone.) And then there are the several sidebars, such as “Fire at the
Globe: Henry VIII‘s stage life began badly; during a performance at the Globe on June 29, 1613, a cannon shot announcing Wolsey’s masked ball sparked a fire in the thatched roof that destroyed the theater in less than two hours.” (Hmm, do you think a Puritan might have been manning the cannon?)
Those who think they know their way around Shakespeare might be taking issue with my mentioning 39 plays. The roster was set at 37 for centuries, and expanded to 38 once The Two Noble Kinsmen was added. But what’s the
39th? Cardenio? No, that’s where Dunton-Downer and Riding drew the line. But this is the first book I’ve seen that credits the Bard with writing Edward III, which, they say, was at least partly written by the Bard between 1590 and 1594. Their description of the 2,605 line script starts with “King Edward, who ruled England from 1327 to 1377, assumed the throne at the age of 14.” A teen king? Already I’m interested. Aren’t you? But if you want to find out all about it, there’s a curt, clear, and concise description awaiting you in Essential Shakespeare Handbook.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]
