SHAKESPEARE AFTER ALL

Finished Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All today. Basically a collection of essays on each play (The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen) with similar thematic considerations. Presents nuanced, well-written views on the majority of the plays, although she does periodically lapse into rote synopsis (a forgivable fault in an otherwise flawless 904-page analysis of Shakespeare's complete (dramatic) repertoire). Throughout, Garber acknowledges the various modes of interpretation for Shakespeare ("every age creates its own Shakespeare," she reminds us), but is confident enough to contradict  prevailing fashions and develop her own position. Avoiding the narrow historicism of today, Garber instead aims for a more holistic, truly literary approach that acknowledges that Shakespeare (as he has for the past five centuries) will outlive the current scholarship on him. This even-handed and moderating approach, a marked contrast to the brain-sizzling hyperbole that is Harold Bloom's The Invention of the Human, is a breath of fresh air. The contrast between raving Bardolatry and judicious reader is most in evidence in her passages dealing with John Falstaff, as well as her refreshingly charitable take on The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Garber clearly intended for Shakespeare After All to function as a reference work, but it can be read fruitfully from cover to cover, a method that reveals a number of the common strands that Garber pulls gleans from Shakespeare's work, specifically: 1).

Garber also goes out of her way to tie Shakespeare to the standard canon of his day, in particular the Geneva Bible, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.


A redness of face normally associated with chronic alcoholics or professional surfers of a Swedish extraction.

THE COLOR OF MAGIC

Took a short break from Marjorie Garber's splendiferous Shakespeare After All to read Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic. Essentially a spoof of the fantasy genre, The Color of Magic details the escapades of wizard-college-dropout Rincewind and his four-eyed companion Twoflower (the first tourist on Discworld), along with the man-eating Luggage and an ensemble of other equally bizarre characters.

Pratchett's writing drips with personality and periodically manages a genuine joke, but far and away the best part of the book is not the writing itself but the subject. The Discworld, it's zany cosmology, intricate but inconsistent, irrational but highly logical, is incredibly imaginative and yet uncannily familiar. Pratchett revels in the act of world-building with the same gleeful animation of a child constructing a universe out of building blocks, and it shows. Imagine a more spectacular, if less profound, Bill Watterson working exclusively in the domain of fantasy/sci-fi parody. Various mythological tropes and satires of our own world mingle and cause a chain reaction.

Prachett does slip into rather unoriginal parody on occasion, and the writing has (more than) the occasional hiccup. But in Discworld, that hardly seems to matter.

STATEMENT OF PORPOISE

Henceforth, this humble blog will feature thorough-ish examinations of each book as I finish reading them. This will a.) keep the humble blog regularly updated, while b.) limiting the amount of extraneous material that I dump into it. Hopefully, forcing myself to write at greater length will also decrease the level of abject stupidity that pervades everything I write. To what extent (if at all) language studies / word-hoarding become a regular subject remains to be seen. Word lists, in the name of Tidiness, will either be relegated to a.) the Jots page, or b.) a smudgy paper notebook.

I reserve the right to be narcissistic, over-opinionated, indecipherable, and generally immature. Since no one will be reading this humble blog, the reader has no right to complain. Furthermore, I reserve the right to changing my humble opinion whenever I very well please.

With the slippery nimbleness of a dolphin, and the furry fury of a tiger, I shall conquer the libraries of the world!!