A C Grayling
Passion & Possibility
Shakespeare the Thinker
By A D Nuttall
Yale University Press 428pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography
By René Weis
John Murray 444pp £25 order from our bookshop
It is often enough observed how mysterious is the phenomenon of genius, even if we no longer think the word denotes a creature who sits on poets’ shoulders and whispers messages from the Muses into their ears. It is one thing to accept that some people can be stunningly inventive and clever, another to fathom the nature of the gifts that make them so. But in the case of Shakespeare, familiarly, all resources fail: here was an individual whose capacities and achievement literally transcend explanation.
Some perhaps grow weary of the pieties collectively indulged about Shakespeare, until they re-read him and are electrified all over again by the language he uses, the insights it conveys, the universality of understanding and sympathy that informs the insights, and the vaulting power of imagination that drives all. But
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