Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors (Vintage Original)
Novelist Isabel Allende keeps a volume of Shakespeare on her nightstand, where other people would keep a Bible. Literary critic Harold Bloom regards Shakespeare’s poetry as the holy text for a secular religion, with Shakespeare himself as God. If Shakespeare has indeed become a deity, the exalted figure in a literary-cultural faith, then Carson has done readers a great service by collecting these 38 essays, revealing in their astonishing diversity how capacious, how protean, that faith has become. It is, as readers learn by listening to actor James Earl Jones, a faith that inspires us with the celestial force of Othello, whom Jones has nicknamed the Sun God. But is also a faith filled with ­frightening devils, as actor-director Ralph Fiennes reminds us, when he discusses the boundless wrath and withering misanthropy of Coriolanus. It is a faith compelling actor Brian Cox to wrestle with existential questions, yet one that allows author Jess Winfield to indulge in facetious wordplay. A cornucopia of delights for lovers of the Bard. --Bryce Christensen