<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K3L4M3" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Books

Shakespeare with or without the waffle

Two new books take a radically different approach, but the lively 30-Second Shakespeare beats the academic ‘alternative biography’ hands down

5 December 2015

9:00 AM

5 December 2015

9:00 AM

30-Second Shakespeare Ros Barber and Mark Rylance

Ivy Press, pp.160, £14.99, ISBN: 9781782402602

The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells

CUP, pp.370, £18.99, ISBN: 9781107699090

30-Second Shakespeare: 50 key aspects of his works, life and legacy, each explained in half a minute sounds trivial, but it isn’t. The purpose of this short, beautifully presented and fully illustrated guide is not to feed vain show-offs with sound-bites to give them something clever to say at dinner parties but, as Ros Barber puts it in her 30-second introduction, ‘to make Shakespeare interesting and comprehensible by cutting out the waffle’.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Subscribe for just $2 a week

Try a month of The Spectator Australia absolutely free and without commitment. Not only that but – if you choose to continue – you’ll pay just $2 a week for your first year.

  • Unlimited access to spectator.com.au and app
  • The weekly edition on the Spectator Australia app
  • Spectator podcasts and newsletters
  • Full access to spectator.co.uk
Or

Unlock this article

REGISTER

'30-Second Shakespeare', £12.74 and 'The Shakespeare Circle', £16.14 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel: 08430 600033

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.


Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator Australia readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Close