Lena Cowen Orlin: The Private Life of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
“Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record.” 1 With these words Samuel Schoenbaum concluded his famous Shakespeare’s Lives ([1970] 1991). Indeed, the resources for a Life of Shakespeare are agonizingly limited. The absence of any kind of personal writings – there are no diaries or letters of any kind – makes the patching together of a biography extremely difficult, if not impossible. Even basic information about Shakespeare’s life, including the exact date of birth, is often lacking. Although Schoenbaum despaired of the possibility of a full literary biography, he did recognize that “each generation must reinterpret the documentary record by its own light.” 2 Lena Cowen Orlin’s Shakespeare’s Private Life is a reinterpretation in this sense.
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2023.01.26 |
Lizenz: | ESV-Lizenz |
ISSN: | 1866-5381 |
Ausgabe / Jahr: | 1 / 2023 |
Veröffentlicht: | 2023-05-26 |