currently reading
Apr. 11th, 2009 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTwo books from the public library shelves that looked interesting. Both are popular histories intended for a general readership, well and entertainingly written, full of personality of the persons discussed, but without skimping on the technical details which give these stories meat. Both concern the reception and understanding of art.
Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch is a history of Shakespeare's posthumous reputation up through the early 19th century, with a few excursions into later times. At first he was just one of many dramatists of his time, and not particularly important among them. And the Puritan hegemony put a damper on any consideration of the theatrical arts. But during the following century-and-a-half he rose to his current position as The Bard.
Lynch does not trace this history in one chronological swoop. Instead, he takes various sub-topics chronologically. First, the performance tradition; then critical and scholarly editions; then tinkering with the texts, itself divided into three topics: theatrical directors who were sure they knew better than Shakespeare how his plays should go, political readings (here we get the difference between Olivier's and Branagh's Henry V), and of course the ever-popular bowdlerizing. Then, Shakespeare forgeries, and lastly the growth of the tourist and souvenir industries.
The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick. The story of Hans van Meegeren, the WW2-era Dutch artist who painted fake Vermeers and sold them to the Nazis. I'm not far into this one yet, but it's already explained how oil paint takes a long time to set properly and how van Meegeren figured out how to fake that. I'm hoping for consideration of two questions: why (besides the fact that we know they're fakes and the original viewers didn't) did the forgeries look like real Vermeers to 1940s experts while they're obviously not if you look at them today; and was van Meegeren a traitor for encouraging the Nazis in looting the Dutch artistic legacy, or a hero for making fools out of them?
Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch is a history of Shakespeare's posthumous reputation up through the early 19th century, with a few excursions into later times. At first he was just one of many dramatists of his time, and not particularly important among them. And the Puritan hegemony put a damper on any consideration of the theatrical arts. But during the following century-and-a-half he rose to his current position as The Bard.
Lynch does not trace this history in one chronological swoop. Instead, he takes various sub-topics chronologically. First, the performance tradition; then critical and scholarly editions; then tinkering with the texts, itself divided into three topics: theatrical directors who were sure they knew better than Shakespeare how his plays should go, political readings (here we get the difference between Olivier's and Branagh's Henry V), and of course the ever-popular bowdlerizing. Then, Shakespeare forgeries, and lastly the growth of the tourist and souvenir industries.
The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick. The story of Hans van Meegeren, the WW2-era Dutch artist who painted fake Vermeers and sold them to the Nazis. I'm not far into this one yet, but it's already explained how oil paint takes a long time to set properly and how van Meegeren figured out how to fake that. I'm hoping for consideration of two questions: why (besides the fact that we know they're fakes and the original viewers didn't) did the forgeries look like real Vermeers to 1940s experts while they're obviously not if you look at them today; and was van Meegeren a traitor for encouraging the Nazis in looting the Dutch artistic legacy, or a hero for making fools out of them?
