30-Second Shakespeare: 50 key aspects of his works, life and legacy, each explained in half a minute sounds trivial, but it isn’t. The purpose of this short, beautifully presented and fully illustrated guide is not to feed vain show-offs with sound-bites to give them something clever to say at dinner parties but, as Ros Barber puts it in her 30-second introduction, ‘to make Shakespeare interesting and comprehensible by cutting out the waffle’.
Thus the reader is invited to peruse this lively compilation of micro-essays in any order, to learn about the different themes that dominate Shakespeare’s plays, his crafty use of language, his knowledge of law, medicine and history, the context in which he wrote his plays, the problems that surround his biography and, of course, his almighty legacy.
By cutting out the waffle, Barber and her team of Shakespearean scholars have shorn the narrative of all but one or two of the silliest myths that have dogged the Shakespeare story since Charles Knight attempted the first full-length biography in 1843.
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