Will - Hardcover

Christopher Rush

3.37

163 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1905636148 ISBN 13: 9781905636143

Publisher: Beautiful Books Limited, 2007

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

March 1616: William Shakespeare is dying, with his lawyer at his bedside. It is time to dictate his will. But how can a man put his affairs in order before he's come to terms with his past? Acclaimed poet, novelist, and Shakespeare professor Christopher Rush has put thirty years of scholarship and creativity into this unforgettable re-imagining of the Bard's life. Rush takes readers into the mind of William Shakespeare, a man whose almost superhuman art was forged from very human frailties and misfortunes. Will takes us back to Shakespeare's childhood, his first encounters with sex, and the dangers of politics, plague, and love. We hear the chilling account of the Tyburn executions, see him crossing the frozen Thames with the wooden beams that would become the Globe theater, and return with him to Stratford on the heartbreaking journey to bury his only son.

Rush has created an utterly irresistible figure whose voice rings true across four hundred years--irrepressible, bawdy, witty, and wise, his every word steeped in the situations and phrases of his own plays.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Christopher Rush is a Scottish writer, born in St Monans and for thirty years a teacher of literature in Edinburgh. His books include A Twelvemonth and a Day and the highly acclaimed To Travel Hopefully.

From Publishers Weekly:

Part literary genesis, part historical thriller, the latest from Rush (A Twelvemonth and a Day, etc.) brims with bawdy luridness and graphic violence as he channels the first-person voice of the world's greatest writer. As a bedridden Will Shakespeare dictates his will to a gluttonous lawyer, he recounts barbarous Renaissance times, from the plague-ridden streets of sweltering Stratford to gory slaughterhouse days before landing his first job at the Rose Theatre, through to the Bloody Mary burnings and tortures of the Counter-Reformation (the nipples crisped and torn off with white-hot pincers... tender tongue, sensitive as a snail, quivering in the vice, while long needles go savagely to work) and beyond. Rush takes on contentious areas of the Bard's life, including his anticlericalism, the connection to assassinated rival Christopher Marlowe, the mystery of his son and the why of a master dramatist's turn to sonneteering. Some moments are decidedly didactic, as when Will dissects his own Twelfth Night. Nevertheless, this ravenous soliloquy fairly bursts with life. (Sept.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.