By Any Other Name
It was supposed to be a beach read. Popular authors like that, I tend to think of them as “airplane reading,” though I spend very little time on airplanes anymore.
While very little popular fiction winds up on my Shakespeare shelves, I had to wonder if this one deserves a place therein.
“What she also knew: When it came to history, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.” Page 51.
Just a notice. It’s lesson I learned from Shakespeare scholarship, mostly, reading fanciful histories, filled with suppositions, inferences, and an abundant lack of references.
It helps having just seen Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at Winedale? Names, conventions, the language itself still fresh? Helps a lot, for me. Too clever by half.
By Any Other Name
Wrapped in a gripping modern-lit split with historical fiction, a tale within a tale, the evidence presented was more than satisfactory. It truly satisfied.
My last real Shakespeare teacher had a simple way to see the authorship problem: the canon attributed to William Shakespeare, for good or for ill, is the respected canon, the body of the work. The person is real or not.
A week back, over lunch with one of the Gemini? I explained simply, “Shakespeare” is the first recorded author of strong female characters, where the women were more than just cardboard cutouts, stock imagery.
Studying Shakespeare, especially in recent years helped sharpened my thinking. There is very little historical record for Mr. William Shakespeare, and this book plays with the evidence.
Plus, big bonus, it’s a fun story, entertaining, with an excellent postscript. Highly recommended. Race, discrimination, all our modern foibles, maybe wrapped in a romance.
By Any Other Name
Winedale 2024
