Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
The Greatest!
By John Bayley
William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius
by Anthony Holden
Little, Brown, 367 pp., $29.95
Shakespeare's Language
by Frank Kermode
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $30.00
We all like to think of the Bard as our own. For homosexuals he is undoubtedly one of themselves; soldiers with a taste for scholarship are quite certain he must have been in the army; men of the law point to his remarkable knowledge of their mysteries; aesthetes like Lytton Strachey to what they think of as his later indifference to everything but poetics and style. Politicians used to prefer him to be the wily Bacon; snobs, the Earl of Oxford. Persons of faith know him for a devout Christian, while for unbelievers he was a dedicated atheist. It is not difficult to find what appears to be good evidence for each and every one of these Shakespeares.[*]
Review, 4238 words
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