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Andrew Dickson (1) (1979–)

Autor(a) de The Rough Guide to Shakespeare

Para outros autores com o nome Andrew Dickson, veja a página de desambiguação.

3 Works 286 Membros 21 Reviews

About the Author

Image credit: Guardian

Obras de Andrew Dickson

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1979
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
UK
Pequena biografia
From The Guardian's website (www.guardian.co.uk):
Andrew Dickson is guardian.co.uk's arts editor, responsible for theatre, visual arts and classical music coverage online. His Rough Guide to Shakespeare came out in 2005, and he makes regular appearances on Radio 4's Front Row

Membros

Resenhas

A pretty darn decent overview of the Bard for a newcomer or amateur fan: this work includes concise but researched synopses of each play and poem, alongside historical, academic and textual notes. It also remembers the crucial mantra that Shakespeare was written to be performed, with an examination of acting styles, reviews of notable film and audio adaptations, and interviews with a dozen-or-so leading Shakespearean actors of the 20th century (Ian McKellen, Harriet Walter and Adrian Lester among them). Even as a more-than-amateur fan of Shakespeare, I found this to be a well-written work.… (mais)
 
Marcado
therebelprince | 1 outra resenha | Oct 24, 2023 |
Esta resenha foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Resenhistas do LibraryThing.
I love Shakespeare, and I love that his works are being embraced all over the world (and possibly among Klingons). So the idea of this book is a wonderful one. After a few accounts, though, I got a bit bored. Perhaps it could have been trimmed down a bit?
 
Marcado
PensiveCat | outras 18 resenhas | Sep 25, 2018 |
This is a fun book for the Shakespeare fan. In the end, I think any grand conclusions about Shakespeare's "universality" elude the author, but his pursuit of the Bard through the continents makes for fascinating reading. Germany's "unser Shakespeare" was scary, India's Bollywood versions were vivid and appealingly exuberant; I had a lot of affinity for South Africa's Shakespeare-as-resistance (and felt ashamed I knew nothing of Sol T. Plaatje), and whatever the opposite of "affinity" is for the uncertain fate of Shakespeare-as-state-propoganda in Maoist China.

But honestly, the strength of the book was not in its history lessons or its travel dialogue (as a traveler, Dickson seems constantly exhausted by the vagaries of train time tables and taxi cabs in traffic) -- it was his account of the myriad of performances he sees, the (seemingly hundreds) of film adaptations he watches. Those are amazing -- school competitions, pirated dvds of old Merchant Ivory productions, outdoor shows in Wild West period dress somewhere in the Sierra Nevada mountains, high culture adaptations into Chinese operatic form. The book is worth reading just for those.
… (mais)
1 vote
Marcado
southernbooklady | outras 18 resenhas | Jun 13, 2017 |
Esta resenha foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Resenhistas do LibraryThing.
Summary: Shakespeare is of course well-beloved in his native England, but his work is read and loved around the globe. In this book, Dickson looks at how Shakespeare's plays and his influence have spread in the four centuries since his death, and how each country and each era that encounters his works adapts them to fit its own cultural ends. This book is organized into five geographical sections: Europe (focusing mostly on Poland and Germany), America, India, South Africa, and China.

Review: I really wanted to love this book. I love Shakespeare, and I love travelogue-style journalistic non-fiction, so the premise of an author traveling around the world to look at how Shakespeare has been seen and adapted and used by different cultures was a fantastically compelling promise. However, this book was a huge struggle for me, and I ultimately didn't finish it -- I made it through the Germany section, and read a little bit of the America section before finally admitting defeat after many months of this sitting mostly untouched on my nightstand. While the premise is really good, I had a hard time with Dickson's writing. It's incredibly dense (not helped by the tiny typeface), with long wordy sentences that often contained so many asides and parentheticals that it was easy to lose track of what the sentence was actually about. The sections themselves were similarly long and dense, and not particularly well-organized, lacking chapter breaks or any other kinds of signposts about where we were in history or in the story. My favorite kinds of non-fiction are typically narrative non-fiction, and this didn't have enough of a narrative thread to hold all of the (incredibly detailed and obviously well-researched) individual pieces together, leaving it to feel kind of dry. And ultimately, while there is clearly a lot of information packed into this book, it didn't do a particularly great job at conveying that information in a memorable way to a non-academic reader (at least not this reader), which is truly a shame. 2 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: As I said, the premise is fantastic, and there are certainly likely to be people out there who get along with Dickson's writing style better than I did, so if you're a fan of Shakespeare and the various incarnations of his work, it's probably worth a shot.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
fyrefly98 | outras 18 resenhas | May 23, 2017 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
3
Membros
286
Popularidade
#81,618
Avaliação
3.9
Resenhas
21
ISBNs
19

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