The Playgoer: Ron Rosenbaum, "Shakespeare Wars"

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Ron Rosenbaum, "Shakespeare Wars"

John Simon resurfaces in the NY Sun today to review Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars. Rosenbaum, an independent cultural journalist, has been one of the most intrepid reporters on the Shakespeare beat. (I still am grateful to his exposé on the NYT/William Niederkorn disgrace, which seems to have finally put a stop to that.)

His book is not about the authorship controversy, but pretty much every other heated spat over interpretation, textual editions, and performances. Sounds like a good read.

As for that authorship thing, that'll have to wait until James Shapiro's next book taking on the conspiracy theorists. (He announced this on a recent Theatre Talk.) Man will get a lot of hatemail.

PS. Thanks to Adam Feldman (in Comments) for pointing us to his own

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rosenbaum's book does sound like a good read, and much of it is. But there's a lot of hyperventilation in it as well, which eventually makes it seem a little dizzy.

(I reviewed it in last week's Time Out -- not an easy book to treat in 280-odd words, but here was my attempt:
http://www.timeoutny.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/572/books/the_shakespeare_wars.xml )

Anonymous said...

Well, that didn't work. Let's try again. (This is one long link, obviously):

http://www.timeoutny.com/newyork/
Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://
TONYWebArticles2/572/books/the_shakespeare_wars.xml