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摘要
摘要
"This graceful historical novel traces Shakespeare's momentous path of creative and emotional self-discovery focusing on his apprentice years and concluding before the great plays that would earn him his fame. It begins with the glover's son roaming the fields of Stratford, hungry for knowledge and restless to escape the boundaries of his small town and loveless marriage. Leaving his family for the turbulence and excitement of London, Will becomes a struggling actor whose charmed, reckless circle of literary and theatrical friends includes John Heminges, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe - men who will in time create an unforgettable period of theater. All the while, however, Shakespeare continues to challenge himself as a writer; soon he is selling his plays and earning acclaim in the world of the London theater and aristocracy." "Yet perhaps his finest and most heartfelt writing of the period can be found in the sonnets written for the Earl of Southampton, the beautiful young lord whose affection and aloofness stir the poet's soul. The Earl becomes Shakespeare's patron, friend, romantic rival, and eventually, his lover. With the Earl and the bewitching Italian musician Emilia Bassano, Shakespeare plunges deep into a tempestuous love triangle that will threaten both his desire to write and his sense of himself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
Having established herself as an historical novelist of the first rank with Nicholas Cooke and The Physician of London, Cowell returns to Elizabethan England with a beautifully nuanced portrait of the young William Shakespeare. Beginning her narrative in 1564 in Stratford, she depicts him as a country lad, as apprentice to his father, a glover, and as hastily married husband, the prelude to his flight to London in search of a job as an actor and playwright. His impoverished years as a walk-on player and a fledgling writer unfold against a vibrantly visualized background of historical events. The narrative is solidly grounded in robust descriptions of daily life, from noisome taverns, alleys and markets to the interiors of courtly mansions and the early theaters themselves. A disciple of the celebrated English critic A.L. Rowse, Cowell subscribes to his theory that Shakespeare's sonnets were written to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, and that the intimacy expressed therein was one of friendship and close association rather than homosexual relations. The mysterious Dark Lady of the Sonnets is here capricious musician Emilia Bassano, and the sexual triangle that ensues when the Earl beds the poet's mistress is the crucible in which Shakespeare suffers and matures. Throughout, Cowell portrays Shakespeare in great agitation as he ponders his talent and ambitions, very much aware, at the age of 31, when the book ends, of his deserted wife and three children and his lack thus far of a permanent career. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is Cowell's measured, graceful language, easily reproducing the cadences of 17th-century English. Because the narrative is a leisurely account of a genius finding himself, there is less action here than some readers may expect. For those who long to become engrossed in another time, however, it will be a treat. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
The most ambitious and least successful of Cowell's fictional re-creations of Elizabethan England (after Nicholas Cooke, 1993, and The Physician of London, 1995). Cowell's protagonist this time is the young William Shakespeare during his first 31 years (156495), following his life first as a dreamy, bookish youngster growing up in the village of Stratford, then as a husband and father who forsakes his family to seek his fortune in London's theater world, and finally--pace Anthony Burgess (whose Nothing Like the Sun remains serenely unchallenged as an imaginative rendering of the Bard's amours)--as the lover both of Italian beauty Emilia Bassano (herself a poet and aspiring playwright, and the inspiration for the ``dark lady'' of the sonnets) and of his handsome patron, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Cowell races through the period's great events (such as the return home of Sir Frances Drake's Armada) that fall during her protagonist's formative years and offers only thumbnail portraits of his comrades and peers, including mysterious ``Kit'' Marlowe and lachrymose Ben Jonson (who ``swore once a sentence, and wept when drunk of his love of God''). This is the sort of historical novel in which the embryonic genius is allowed to utter rough first versions of what will later become immortal lines, and in which his male lover fervently declares, ``I have a strange love for thee, I know not from where it comes. I want thy stories and thy wisdom and I cannot quite put thee from my heart.'' This is a Harlequin romance. Burgess did it better.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
First Nicholas Cooke...then The Physician of London...and now from Cowell, who specializes in re-creating the Elizabethan era, a novel about young William Shakespeare. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.