cover image What Would Shakespeare Do?

What Would Shakespeare Do?

Jess Winfield. Gramercy Books, $7.99 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-517-22006-1

This breezy popularization endeavors to make Shakespeare as digestible as a Dear Abby column, with predictably inane results. Winfield, co-author of the stage comedy The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) takes Shakespearean snippets and uses them as starting points for short homilies on topics such as time-management, sexual relations and seizing the day. But mining Shakespeare for platitudes doesn't make Shakespeare more relevant to self-helpers or platitudes more profound. Bromides about real beauty coming from within (Antonio's ""None can be called deformed but the unkind"" bit in Twelfth Night) are unswervingly stale, especially when taken out of their poetic or dramatic context. Nor will Winfield's perversely shallow glosses-a scene from Lear's blasted heath becomes a reminder to use sunscreen, while MacBeth's bleak ""To-morrow and to-morrow"" soliloquy prompts a rant against drive-time shock jocks-win Shakespeare any converts. The author calls Hamlet's Polonius a ""windbag"" full of ""verbose blather"" and ""twaddle,"" but then approvingly cites said windbag as an authority on friendship, wardrobe, debt and the meaning of life. In the end, good advice-even the Bard's-is dull; what makes us laugh and weep are Shakespeare's insights into why people don't follow it.