Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.
Books about Shakespeare tend, therefore, to tell us more about their authors than they do about the playwright, although they are no less valid for this. Two recent additions to the scholarly ephemera make the case that, even when we might feel a subject is exhausted, there is always something new to illuminate.
Straight Acting: The many queer lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh
Sceptre, $34.99 pb, 292 pp
The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on how leaders rise, rule, and fall by Eliot A. Cohen
Basic Books, $55 hb, 277 pp
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