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• W2989659413 abstract "Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature by Stuart Kells Denis Donoghue (bio) Stuart Kells, Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018), 322 pp. Shakespeare's library does not exist. If it existed, someone in the past 403 years would have found it. In the first half of his book, Stuart Kells rambles through the lives of several seekers or pirates, who claimed, or rather pretended, to have discovered the treasure. We read of George Barrington, Samuel and William Ireland, John Blacker, Rev. James Wilmot, James Halliwell, John Payne Collier, and surprisingly, of Thomas Wise. Only two seekers escape whipping: Edmond Malone and John Fry. In the second part—nearly half of the book—we have short chapters that have little or nothing to do with Shakespeare: a few pages on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a digression on Bernard Shaw's notes on the plays, a breezy chapter explaining how Kells has maintained good relations with his colleagues at Monash University who believe that Sir Henry Neville wrote Shakespeare's plays, and a brief account of how Kells and his wife Fiona donated a supply of pulp fiction to the library at Monash. The last chapter discusses Ben Jonson's library. In some pages between the two parts, Kells presents his understanding of Shakespeare. He is still the man from Stratford. I do not find any mystery unlocked. Kells does not claim to have anything new to say about Shakespeare's sources, the poems, historical essays, and sermons he read as preparation for each play. That matter has been comprehensively brought forward by Kenneth Muir in the second edition of his The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (2005) and by Geoffrey Bullough in the eight volumes of his Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1966). The gist of Kells's argument is in this passage: Shakespeare occupied an intermediate phase in a dramaturgical production process. In the phase immediately before him, authors and poets and dramatists wrote source texts. That phase extended years and even centuries back in time. In the phase immediately after him, editors prepared playtexts for publication. That phase, though shorter, also spanned years and in some cases decades. Shakespeare's in-between job was to transform the source texts into topical, enjoyable, performable plays … Shakespeare picked from some sources like a magpie; others he gulped down whole, appropriating entire plots along with ready-made characters, dialogue and settings. Kenneth Muir's book gives more evidence of magpies than of gulps. For each play, Shakespeare evidently read whatever sources he found in its vicinity. These could be various. Professor Muir is assured that Shakespeare was quite a good Latinist, that he read French, and had smatterings [End Page 609] of Spanish and Italian. Kells implies that he was dependent on his sources, and that his relation to them—or to some of them—was that of pupil to master. I doubt it. I am persuaded by Muir that Shakespeare may have started out enjoying the latitude of his sources, but that gradually he began to exert a preference among them, reducing the lot to perhaps one or two. He always knew that Cinthio could not have written Othello, Holinshed Macbeth, Appian Anthony and Cleopatra, or Montaigne The Tempest. He was master in his own house. Kells thinks it worth saying, with confidence that Shakespeare had a hand in the plays and poems that bear his name. A hand? One? I count two hands, both at the service of an extraordinary intelligence, call it imagination. The other passage I should quote develops the idiom of process: In this sequential process there is no need, and indeed no room, for a secret author, aristocratic or otherwise. All that the middle stage requires is a workaday dramatist with a talent for converting prior content into performable and entertaining plays. (And one with the nerve to keep doing it when prior writers complained.) The size and shape of that person fits Shakespeare very well. He was not a detached, meticulous, uber-literary author. He was a practically talented, commercial man, in tune with audiences. He seems to have cared little about how perfectly..." @default.
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• W2989659413 title "Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature by Stuart Kells" @default.
• W2989659413 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2019.0076" @default.
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