Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life

By (author) O'Toole Fintan
Short description/annotation:
A provocative but serious reflection on Shakespeare''s greatest tragedies, showing how the finest plays of Shakespeare have been made unintelligible and irrelevant to a modern audience in an attempt to fit a world of conservative values.
Description:

The works of Shakespeare have become staples of literature. They are everywhere, from our early schooling to the lecture rooms of academia, from classic theatre to modern adaptations on stage and screen. But how well do we really know his plays?

In this witty, iconoclastic book, the bestselling author Fintan O’Toole examines four of Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. He shows how their tragic heroes have been over-simplified and moulded to fit restrictive, conservative values, and restores the true heart and spirit of the classics.

''I''ve never read a book like this before: it''s challenging, irreverent and funny.'' Roddy Doyle

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I’ve never read a book like this before: it’s challenging, irreverent and funny.
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Convincing, incisive and stimulating.
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A brilliant and extremely readable distillation of some of the current thinking about Shakespeare’s tragedies.
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A lively and intelligent work of criticism...Shakespeare is hard, and O’Toole has valiantly refused to simplify him.
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A useful corrective to the philistine notion that Shakespeare must be simplified and domesticated so that people can understand him.
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You’ll look at Shakespeare with new eyes after reading this book.
Biographical note:
Fintan O''Toole is the bestselling author of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Heroic Failure, Ship of Fools, A Traitor''s Kiss, White Savage and other acclaimed books. He is a columnist for the Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. He has received the Silvers-Dudley Prize for Journalism, the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize.
Promotional headline:
A provocative but serious reflection on Shakespeare''s greatest tragedies, showing how the finest plays of Shakespeare have been made unintelligible and irrelevant to a modern audience in an attempt to fit a world of conservative values.
Feature:
Small, elegant gift book that will appeal to both Shakespeare and general readers.
Feature:
From acclaimed writer and drama critic Fintan O’Toole, author of We Don’t Know Ourselves and Heroic Failure.
Feature:
Market: The Shakespeare Book; Will In The World by Stephen Greenblatt; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro; Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell