Friday, February 1, 2013

Book Note: The Shakespeare Thefts

Rasmussen, Eric. The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

I found this book diverting. One of the shining lights of Shakespeare scholarship has written what amounts to a set of memoirs surrounding the First Folio. Though some chapters seem to break off before developing their ideas fully, they all tell interesting stories.

Many of the tales are about Folios that have gone missing. Rasmussen tells the story of the man who claimed to have found a First Folio in Cuba—but who had somehow obtained a copy stolen from Durham University.

Though the book is episodic and, therefore, a bit scattered, I appreciated it—being episodic and a bit scattered myself. It would make a good gift for the Shakespeare aficionado in your life.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

1 comment:

e meritus prauf said...

Episodic makes for perfect in-flight reading. Great gift idea!

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

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