Review by Choice Review
Kells's accessible book complements work on Shakespeare by Jonathan Gil Harris and Tanya Pollard by redressing the myth that Shakespeare was an untutored genius who was not bookish. In emphasizing Shakespeare as theater-maker rather than "owner and gatherer of books" (p. 3), critics have neglected to consider the access to learning Shakespeare must have had. Kells is too responsible to try to establish what was in Shakespeare's library, because he recognizes that the actual contents of the library are, as he writes in the last chapter, surrounded by "uncertainty" and prone "to continual reinvention." Thus the book is a history of conjectures about Shakespeare's library, not a definitive account of it. Kells sees Shakespeare as a learned writer in the midst of print culture, and he sees this as a fact that decisively rebuts the anti-Stratfordian case that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays. Since few scholars contest the Stratfordian origin of Shakespeare's corpus, the book is primarily directed to the general reader, who will enjoy the breezy, engaging tone and Kells's clear excitement about libraries and librarianship. That said, the book will leave scholars with a discerning sense of Shakespeare not just as a creator but as a man who cherished books. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Nicholas Birns, New York University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SHAKESPEARE'S POWER TO ENDURE has been ensured by twin track modes of survival: his life on the page and on the stage. His texts are pored over scrupulously by academics, read dreamily by kids and scanned with soft remembrance by the sere. At any given moment, his dramatic verse is sung, shouted, muttered and sometimes spoken with the warm assurance it needs, from hundreds of stages to thousands of eager spectators. Two new books - "Shakespeare's Library," by Stuart Kells, and "What Blest Genius?," by Andrew McConnell Stott - offer insights from each strand. Stott's book delivers a vivacious portrait of the Stratford-upon-Avon Jubilee of 1769, organized by the actor and manager David Garrick, whose goal was to make a lot of noise for himself and in the process marmorealize Shakespeare. Kells goes on a quest through the oddly perverse world of booksellers and bibliographers, in search of Shakespeare's own tomes. Coming from a performance rather than an academic background, I have a greater propensity for the Garrick story, but whatever your background, it's easy to distinguish between a book to be cherished and one to be thrown across the room. Garrick's Jubilee of 1769 runs the Fyre Festival of 2017 close for overambition, chaotic planning and near disaster. Garrick, unlike Billy McFarland, somehow got away with it. Britain was in a state of turbulence, with the public, Parliament and crown in revolt against one another. Benjamin Franklin said he witnessed around England at this time "riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of sailors." When Garrick attempted to reduce the number of discounted tickets at his own Drury Lane, a riot ensued from the pit in the presence of the king, the queen and Casanova, which led to the shredding of the theater. As a grand distraction, Garrick threw a fabulous party in the middle of England to canonize a new English saint, William Shakespeare. Talked up by the froth-thirsty press and obsessed over by sensation-hungry society, the event was a must-see. As the date approached, the poorly kept roads between London and the modest market town that was Stratford were clogged with coaches. On the day before the opening, it became impossible for carriages to get in or out across the one narrow bridge. When ticket-holders finally arrived, accommodation was to be had only at a ridiculous premium; Lord Daft and Lady Bonkers found themselves sleeping in local stables with the cows. As a Midlands morning dawned to kick things off, gray clouds filled the skies, and soon began to weep. They carried on doing so for three days. A lavishly costumed pageant was canceled, and logistics were horribly disrupted. The centerpiece of the event was a newly built wooden rotunda to house musical performances, feasts and balls. By the time of the final dance, it had filled up with water: "As the evacuees splashed away, the rotunda creaked and groaned, loosening its hinges as its founda- The actor tions imperceptibly rose and began to float." The image of the British aristocracy wading through muddy quadrilles is irresistible. Yet Garrick pulled it off. Though barely a word of Shakespeare was spoken over the three days, the actor summoned the entire throng to the rotunda late one morning to listen to a self-penned ode to Shakespeare. The verse here is both incantatory and ordinary but Garrick's performance, full of fiercely restrained passion and a mystical sense of otherness, gathered the energy of the whole event into a time-stopping instant. For an enchanted moment everyone held a breath and felt history occurring. Many swooned, many sobbed, none forgot. This is a hallowed form of what can best be described as The Higher Hogwash. It is deferential, humbled and in touch with the gods. It manages to be both transparently bogus and movingly convincing. It has got English actors through a whole load of scrapes across the centuries. A serious need for devotion lay beneath the sodden bombast. Stratford was a Catholic-leaning town, and England was a nostalgically Catholic country, however far and wide Protestant sympathies rampaged. When Lord Grosvenor raised a cup carved from Shakespeare's mulberry tree, treating the "blest relic" as if it were a chalice filled with Communion wine, the eyebrows of the more puritan present were raised high. The same tree competed with famous Christian icons for its rate of reliquary dismemberment. It's not hard, in a country that felt an atavistic hunger for saints and sanctification, to grasp the need for such bardolatry. Stott quotes Boswell's enthusiasm for Garrick's acting by saying that he made "particles of vivacity" dance within him "by a sort of contagion." The same compliment is owed to Stott for the manner in which he tells this eccentric story. Stuart Kells's search for Shakespeare's lost library takes him down highways and byways, which will be fascinating to those obsessed with books and manuscripts but full of unintended comedy for everyone else. He tells us early on that "among Shakespearean researchers (very, very broadly defined), more than one died from arsenic poisoning or narcotics; more than one perished in prison. There are serious whispers of a Shakespeare Curse." It would be truly hard to come up with a more expansive definition of "researcher." While sifting through details of how in the course of history someone passed on an obscure quarto edition to someone else, it is hard not to think that the curse is on the reader. There is an enduring paradox in the centuries of bibliographical obsession with the work of a man who didn't give a hoot about books. We owe much to the heroism of John Heminges and Henry Condell for collecting Shakespeare's work, and to Edmond Malone and generations of others for carefully editing it. But it is exhausting dealing with the higher priests of Shakespearean arcana, who believe that because they are enthralled by book bindings, frontispieces and vellum, then Shakespeare must have been too. In the world of these high priests, nothing can be what it seems. Heminges and Condell can't have compiled the First Folio simply because the historical record says they did; Ben Jonson can't have approved of his contemporary because he wrote just that; and finally, of course, we tumble into the monumental blindness to reality of the authorship question. Shakespeare cannot be Shakespeare, because he was. Kells discounts the authorship nonsense efficiently, but not before giving it an unjustified amount of airtime. Two acquaintances in Melbourne, where he lives, were Shakespeare skeptics, an academic choice that Kells is keen to portray as one of living-on-the-edge excitement. To complement their literary risk-taking, we are told of the dangers of their local neighborhood: "Bushfires regularly threatened the district. On the main road, reckless kangaroos jumped precipitously into the path of cars." Somehow his friends survived the perils of kamikaze marsupials to become passionate supporters of the authorship case of Sir Henry Neville. Having debunked most of the betterknown rival claimants, Kells settles on his own theory, which is that Shakespeare was only a dramatic adapter of previous texts, and a clumsy one at that. Most of the quality in the plays comes from the editing process. In Kells's surmise this was done by John Florio and Ben Jonson, who "did what editors do today: tighten syntax, enrich vocabulary, improve structure and flow, enhance rhythm and rhyme, and beautify the whole." It's hard to imagine that he has ever looked at the First Folio. One of the principal proofs for his argument is that he knows of two Jacobean contemporaries who bought both Jonson's "Workes" of 1616 and the First Folio of 1623, suggesting that the two volumes were seen at the time as "part of a single endeavor." This defies belief. A book so determined to chase its own tail in its pointlessness has every right to become a cult classic. Everyone, as has been frequently commented, makes a Shakespeare in his or her own image. His comprehensive universality, and his ability to match each and every one of us and become uniquely ours, is another of the modes by which he survives - fresh, pertinent and alive. The Shakespearean umbrella is broad and embracing, and it can happily cover egomaniacal actor-managers, and even kangaroo-endangered bibliographers. Dominic dromgoole was the artistic director of the Globe Theater from 2006 to 2016. His book "Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years, 190,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play" was published in 2017.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Upon seeing recently discovered documents from Shakespeare's personal library, the eighteenth-century biographer James Boswell kissed each item, declaring, I shall now die contented. Kells never says whether Boswell turned in his grave when the cache was exposed as fraudulent one year after his death. But as Kells brings to life the participants in the four-century quest to find the Bard's fugitive library, readers learn a great deal about the enigmatic legacy of England's greatest poet. Though scholars have identified sources Shakespeare drew from in his plays and poems, their efforts to find the writer's manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, or books have yielded nothing except a fascinating history of their own leave-no-stone-unturned search. Kells skewers those who have made the absence of manuscripts from Shakespeare's pen their opening for theories of how Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or Henry Neville actually authored the Shakespearean corpus. Still, the iconic image of the flawless Bard loses credibility in Kells' riveting account of a streetwise poet who rarely missed a trick as he made his fortune in the rough-and-tumble world of Elizabethan drama and book publishing. This savvy operator left to mysterious other hands the task of collecting and editing his works for posterity. To read, or not to read? Here, there's no question!--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Kells (The Library) delivers a fascinating examination of a persistent literary mystery: William Shakespeare's library. Through careful research, Kells constructs a narrative around the centuries-long search for this elusive holy grail for scholars, interwoven with anecdotes of the author's roguish escapades and comments on the ongoing debate about the Shakespeare oeuvre's true authorship. Citing records and studies from the 16th century to the modern day, Kells discusses various potential clues uncovered by scholars, such as a 1570 Bible filled with "more than a thousand underlinings and notes," many relevant to Shakespeare plays. In addition, Kells includes his own interpretations of what can be gleaned from Shakespeare's writing, such as the playwright's "close familiarity with the physicality of books and the mechanics of their production." He also relies heavily on the legwork of John Fry, a 19th-century bookseller whose efforts uncovered many primary sources for the plays, such as the manual Practice of the Use of the Rapier and Dagger; and the Honor of Honorable Quarrels (stabbing, Kells notes, is "the principal cause of death" for Shakespearean characters). Shakespeare fans will surely be riveted by the new information brought to light in Kells's rich literary survey. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
William Shakespeare's works draw on hundreds of writers, from the classics to his contemporaries. According to Kells (Penguin and the Lane Brothers, The Library), the Bard's Stratford house, New Place, had a study with books in the 1630s. Yet none of Shakespeare's personal volumes have ever been found, and only three pages of his actual manuscripts. Kells's account of the search for Shakespeare's library leads through many fascinating bypaths of book history. He recounts the forgeries of William-Henry Ireland, who "discovered" new manuscript versions of "Hamblette" and the "Tragedye of Kynge Leare" and even an entirely new play, Vortigern. Kells discusses some of the well-known bibliophiles of the early 19th century, among them John Ker, third Duke of Roxburghe; George John, second Earl Spencer; and more obscure figures, such as the clergyman Francis Wrangham, as well as Shakespeare scholars George Steevens and John Payne Collier (also a forger). While no one has yet found Shakespeare's library, Kells hopes new leads may yet surface. The work takes an unfortunate detour into the Cloud Cuckoo Land of the authorship question, claiming Ben Jonson and John Florio greatly improved Shakespeare's mediocre plays. VERDICT Still, an enjoyable excursion into Shakespearean (and non--Shakespearean) booklore.-Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Shakespeare scholar takes on the "biggest enigma in literature."Shortly after William Shakespeare died in 1616, friends and scholars began looking for his books, figuring that he must have had many. Shakespeare was notorious for borrowing plots and characters from histories and literary works. Where were these source books? Shakespeare's brief will makes no mention of them. This is the premise of historian and award-winning author Kells' (The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, 2018, etc.) look "through the lens of the searchers themselves," a search that "bears upon fundamental principles of art, history, meaning and truth." It's an engaging and provocative contribution to the unending world of Shakesperiana. On his wide-ranging journey, Kells discovered many intriguing clues, but the mystery of the missing library remains unsolved. The author notes that besides a missing library, there were no manuscripts, letters, or diaries. This leads to his insightful discussion of the " Shakespeare Authorship Question'how he worked, what he wrote and, most controversially, whether he wrote at all." Kells takes on the detractors with gusto, especially those promoting Shakespeare's contemporary, the diplomat Sir Henry Neville. Along the way, the author entertains us with a fascinating publishing history of the plays and stories of famous book collectors. "To reach something like the truth," he writes, "we must walk through noxious territory, consort with cranks and rogues." Kells also provides a revealing assessment of the famous 1623 First Folio, the first collection of the plays. Authoritative? It's an "unreliable source," Kells writes. "Posthumous, incomplete, error-ridden; produced by piratical publishers and hidden editors." He concludes with the tantalizing Littlewood Letter, "arguably the most important Shakespeare letter in the world todayprovided, of course, it is genuine." On the whole, Kells delivers reams of arcane bibliographical information with humor and wit.Even though the narrative bogs down in the middle under the figurative weight of bibliomania, overall, this is an enchanting work that bibliophiles will savor and Shakespeare fans adore. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
