Chris Laoutaris

There's lots of fascinating insight here into how the First Folio was put together. This ranges from the personal connections between the printers/ publishers to the actual physical process of putting a book together.

As the sources can be frustratingly incomplete, the author's arguments often are 'possible' rather than anything more than this. He believes Shakespeare may have been trying to put a folio together at the time of his death, and creates a picture of the different compositors who worked on the folio (despite acknowledging that theories vary). I thought he was particularly good at explaining the different possible influences on the 'original' plays Shakespeare wrote, from the actors who inherited the scripts to the changing censorship laws, changes made due to revivals of the original plays and political sensitivities, to the compositors trying to get the whole play on a set number of pages. I loved the reproductions of the existing copies of the folios, where people had annotated the plays (in one case, with whether they knew the actors or not). The bit at the end about the ways the folios had been used by colonial governors to prop up colonial education projects felt a bit tacked on, but I can imagine this could be easily picked up in other texts.… (mais)

Chris Laoutaris had the interesting idea of bringing together the various people and events that went towards the creation and publication of the First Folio. He tells the story clearly and keeps our attention without much resort to over dramatisation (although there are a few irritating moments, such as a ‘trembling’ Shakespeare amending his will). I don’t think there is anything here which really counts as original (unsurprisingly) and Laoutaris probably over-hypes his claim about the importance of the death of Burbage as a pivotal moment but I mostly enjoyed this light read. There are many, many plates of the First Folio included. For all I know they have been fantastically reproduced in the printed copy but as usual in the ebook version low quality images have been slung in without much care.… (mais)

An impressive piece of scholarship that has resulted in one of the most frustrating biographies I’ve read. As a biography of the Puritan self-styled Dowager Countess (she had no legal right to the title) Elizabeth Russell this could have been an insightful study of a powerful intellectual woman embroiled in Tudor politics. Instead it plays on the fact that she once sued William Shakespeare (a very minor part of her life) and tries to tie everything back to that event. The book is overloaded with the research and the central narrative gets lost in too many names, tangential speculation, ham-fisted cliched foreshadowing, and irrelevant details. #2020reads #books #review… (mais)

The title is actually misleading, Shakespeare only makes a cameo appearance at the end of the book, it is really the life story of the Dowager Countess Elizabeth Russell, a remarkable woman in a era of remarkable women. Well-educated, avowedly Puritan, fiercely determined to advance her family, she ran foul of the Bard when she successfully petitioned to have the Blackfriars theatre adjacent to her London home closed, forcing Shakespeare and co. to look further afield. The end result was the Globe theatre, and the rest is history. But Russell's story itself is fascinating, replete with the most powerful figures in Tudor society. Essex, Cecil, Walsingham, and many others, she knew them all and was related to many. While the book's concentration on minute details and historical exactness can be hard-going, it is always interesting. Not an exciting read, but an absorbing one.… (mais)