Shakespeare: The Biography

I have been chipping away at this book for months and final finished it this weekend. Drake had bought this for me because we were planning to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year, but then when the family gathering got suddenly planned for August my vacation time got allocated instead to that. We might have still gone, but I also need to have some minor surgery this fall so we'll just have to plan for 2007.

Anyway, I don't (or didn't) know much about Shakespeare, but I did know that, well, people don't know much about him. A better title for this book might be Shakespeare: A Speculation. It's an interesting book, though, particularly if you enjoy the Elizabethan period. The book knits together little scraps of knowledge about Shakespeare with details about what life was like in Stratford and London at the time. It does read like a biography and it's an easy and entertaining read. And, the book does seem to do a crisp job of differentiating fact from speculation.

I'm excited about what's next on my nightstand: The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte was Mozart's librettist for Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte. This year Seattle Opera is putting on a new production of Don Giovanni - probably my favorite non-Wagner opera - and I've always wanted to read more about Da Ponte (he was a pretty wild guy - close friends with Casanova, who I believe might have had some input to the libretto of Don Giovanni - maybe as a subject matter expert :-)). I think this will be a fun read.