Post Scriptum #353

Quantas biografias de Shakespeare se escreveram ao longo do tempo? Muitas. Muitas e agora mais esta. A crítica de Adam Gopnik sobre este novo "Will in the World", de Stephen Greenblatt, parece-me muito interessante. Começa assim:

Why do we read critical biographies of Shakespeare? The reasons that we shouldn't have been ably given by his best critics. "Reader, looke/ not on his Picture, but his Booke" was Ben Jonson's advice right there at the start, on the title page of the First Folio. (...) The advice not to look at the life continues to this day. Artists, Auden insisted, should be anonymous. (...) But Auden filled his criticism with confident assertions about Shakespeare's love life, and Jonson himself couldn't help but chat compulsively about the man: he couldn't write Latin or Greek, he was a social climber, he needed an editor. Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives.