Becoming Shakespeare
How a Provincial Playwright Became the World's Foremost Literary Icon
Jack Lynch

Reviews of Becoming Shakespeare

"An informative account of the afterlife of the provincial playwright...Becoming Shakespeare is filled with scrumptious stories."—Glenn C. Altschuler, Philadelphia Inquirer

"An accessible and fascinating book...An absolute must for any Shakespeare enthusiast, but it will also appeal to readers with an interest in theatre, literary criticism, or just a wonderful historical tale."—Bookslut

"In "Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into the Bard," Lynch takes up that inquiry and pursues it with an unpretentious erudition and impious relish that makes you envy his Rutgers University students. A good literary history is a story about stories, and a good literary historian, which Lynch most surely is, has regard but not reverence for his subject. He's a fine storyteller with a real scholar's facility for the apt rather than the showy quotation..."Becoming Shakespeare" can be read as a meditation on fame as condition apart from our contemporary notion of celebrity: the difference between a reputation earned by distinctive and distinguished conduct as opposed to one conferred by mere attentionÉ.The best thing about Jack Lynch's fascinating book is that it helps us to understand that process by which so many of us have come to share Johnson's opinion. That transformation was every bit as contingent and turbulent as one of William Shakespeare's great dramas."—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Not long after Shakespeare's death in 1616, the puritans closed England's theaters, and when Charles II reopened them in 1660, Shakespeare's plays were understandably forgotten. It took a long process of revival, performance, study, improvement (adulteration, to modern eyes), co-optation, domestication, forgery, and, finally, what amounted to worship to establish Shakespeare as the transcendent genius of the English language. Lynch devotes a lively, well-informed chapter to each aspect of that process as he argues that Shakespeare was transformed into a secular saint by successive waves of actors, scholars, adapters, propagandists, expurgators, self-aggrandizers, and cultural entrepreneurs. The apotheosis took some 250 years and involved great names in English cultural history (most notably, the actor David Garrick) and quite a few astonishing miscreants, such as the forger William Henry Ireland, who only wanted his father's respect, it seems. Lynch makes virtually every one of these figures fascinating, amusingly revealing their idiosyncrasies without letting any of them obscure the ongoing movement he traces. A book for Shakespeareans of all stripes to relish with gusto. —Ray Olson, Booklist

"Aiming to examine how opinions of and attitudes toward Shakespeare have mutated since the playwright's death in 1616, Lynch (English, Rutgers Univ.; ed., Samuel Johnson's Dictionary) here provides an introduction to and overview of how different eras perceived Shakespeare and presented his plays and discusses the development of what has become the "Shakespeare industry." In part, the text is a history of theater in England that mostly concentrates on attitudes there. The chapter on early Shakespearean actors focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries and provides more information about the actors than on how they shaped their respective eras' view of Shakespeare. Lynch is most interesting when examining how different eras rewrote and edited Shakespeare to make the plays meet the moral and theatrical standards of their time. He includes a list of suggested readings but provides no footnotes or references. A more useful scholarly study of Shakespeare's cultural impact is John Gross's After Shakespeare: An Anthology. However, Lynch's text will appeal to general readers with an interest in Shakespeare. Recommended for public libraries.—Shana C. Fair,Library Journal

"An accessible chronicle of Shakespeare's rise to his present glory. Samuel Johnson scholar Lynch (English/Rutgers) quickly makes clear what this study involves: the long process that turned a very competent playwright into a demigod. Picking up where many a Shakespearean leaves off, he dismisses the authorship question entirely. Fantasies about faked deaths and undercover noblemen certainly make for an exciting story, he writes, but there's nothing to them. Lynch focuses instead on charting Shakespeare's transformation from a popular playwright in his day to a writer many now consider the keystone of the Western literary canon. This metamorphosis, he contends, has taken hundreds of years and the collected efforts of numerous individuals from a variety of arenas, some more predictable than others. It was only after the Restoration in 1660, for instance, that Shakespeare's work gained onstage life it hadn't known since the Puritans closed the public theatres in 1642. Charles II sanctioned two new theatres, which brought drama back to the fore of London life and enabled late-17th- to early-18th-century actors such as Thomas Betterton, James Quin, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons to gain great fame by playing Shakespeare's leading roles. Lynch provocatively argues that the great rise in literacy occurring around the time of the Restoration also contributed to the birth of critical interest in the plays as texts; fierce disputes arose over their interpretation, the manna of Shakespeare criticism to this day. He engagingly details the strengths, shortcomings and literary relevance of major editions alongside those now merely of historical interest because they attempted to sanitize the bawdy bard to reflect the more decorous tastes of late-18th-century or Victorian sensibilities. Pitched just right for students of literature, Shakespeareans and those interested in the history of drama: a witty and appealing story of how a superstar was born."—Kirkus Reviews

About Jack Lynch