Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story

Book Description

From one of our most distinguished Shakespeare scholars, here is a fascinating, lively, anecdotal work of forensic biography that firmly places Shakespeare within the hectic, exhilarating world in which he lived and wrote.

Theater in Shakespeare's day was a burgeoning “growth industry." Everyone knew everyone else, and they all sought to learn, borrow or steal from one another. As Stanley Wells suggests: "To see Shakespeare as one among a great company is only to enhance our sense of what made him unique.”

Wells explores Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, both behind the scenes and in front of the curtain. He examines how the great actors of the time influenced Shakespeare's work. He writes about the lives and works of the other major writers of Shakespeare’s day and discusses Shakespeare’s relationships—sometimes collaborative—with each of them. And throughout, Wells shares his vast knowledge of the period, re-creating and celebrating the sheer richness and variety of Shakespeare's social and cultural milieus.

Shakespeare and Co. gives us a new understanding of how the Bard achieved unparalleled singularity as the greatest writer in the language.

Customer Reviews:

Shakespeare & Co........2007-07-16

Stanley Wells is one of the great Shakespeare scholars of this, or any other, generation. His work on the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, the Textual Companion, the Dictionary of Shakespeare and, if I can mention a personal favorite, Shakespeare for All Time, assure his enduring reputation. It was with keen anticipation I picked up this book, then, and I was not disappointed. The book is not groundbreaking, by any means, but is pleasant, erudite, and consistently interesting. It is the best introduction I know to placing Shakespeare in the theatrical currents of his time and tracing his interactions, such as they can be known, with his less famous, though greatly gifted, contemporaries Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Fletcher, Webster and the rest.

In an age such as ours where otherwise serious people can become preoccupied with crank, dilettantish ideas like the Oxford wrote Shakespeare nonsense so much in circulation, how likely is it those same serious people have taken the time to read Shakespeare's less well known fellows? They have, perhaps, read Dr. Faustus in an English lit survey class, and know about Marlowe because, after all, HE might, just maybe, be the one who really wrote at least some of Shakespeare's plays, but certainly they have not read either part of Tamburlaine, or A Trick To Catch The Old One, or The Shoemakers Holiday. Need enough, then, that a thoroughgoing, popular introduction to the lives and masterpieces of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries deserves a home on our bulging Shakespeare bookshelves.

The first sentence of the Preface says "This book attempts to place Shakespeare in relation to the actors and other writers, mainly playwrights, of his time in an accessible and where possible entertaining manner" (ix). And so it does, with, speaking for myself, at least, emphasis on "entertaining." I found the book enormously likable. If you are familiar with the period and the authors being treated, you will find nothing new, but a non-specialists book surveying a rather broad field does not attempt to present novel interpretations, but rather can be relied on to deliver the state-of-the-art scholarly understanding of these authors and their works in a pleasant style. Wells's scholarly status guarantees the most dependable understanding of the times and writers, and his gifts as a writer makes reading a joy.

Shakespeare and Co: Marlow, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the other Players in His Story.......2007-05-24

A fun, fast read...If your looking for who wrote Shakespeare other the Shakespeare you will be disappointed...Prof. Wells though speculates on who may have collaborated with Shakespeare on some plays a little more freely the other academics might but don't look for a smoking gun...the best passage in the book in my opinion is Prof. Wells description of the death of Marlow, it is vivid and would make a great story for any High School Lit. teacher to use to spice up her/his Jr. Eng. Lit. class.

If you are into Shakespeare I think you will find "Shakespeare & Co.:..." a great read.

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Afternoon Tea!
Nice book on English Tea
Good things do come in small packages
The Best Resource for Tradition as well as Recipes!
Best of 4

The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea
Helen Simpson
Manufacturer: William Morrow Cookbooks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Baking | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Coffee & Tea | Drinks & Beverages | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

General | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books

Brunch & Tea | Special Occasions | Cooking, Food & Wine | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0877958238
Release Date: 1986-10-25

Book Description

Afternoon tea is the english meal-time institution, a social as well as a culinary event.

It is precisely this atmosphere which is embodied in the Palm Court Tearoom at the Ritz in London, which for many years has been one of the most delightful and traditional places to take tea.

The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea captures the essence of this traditional British occasion and provides the reader with all the Ritz expertize in the ceremony as well as over 50 recipes, illustrated with passages from Dickens to Oscar Wilde and charming drawings.

Customer Reviews:

Afternoon Tea!.......2007-05-12

what a great book! my idea of luxury is to attend afternoon tea in a great hotel-and now I can recreate some of the recipes (but not the harpist) at home. If you like tea, good food, and learning about creating a mood or an atmosphere for your guests, this little book is just great!

Nice book on English Tea.......2007-01-19

I enjoyed reading this book. It is a good starter book for those who would like to understand the ritual of English Tea and basic recipes of this time of day.

Good things do come in small packages.......2006-10-18

Lots of easy, great recipes. If for no other reason, you should buy this book just for the basic english muffin recipe and scone recipes.

The Best Resource for Tradition as well as Recipes!.......2006-08-09

A friend and I have recently begun taking tea and we love the true British and Victorian style of tea houses. I wanted to find a book for her that was a great resource on the history of afternoon and high tea as well as providing some recipes to go along with the information. This was the best book I found. No other goes into as much detail about the history of tea that this book does. The only downfall is that the only illustrations in the book are line drawings. There are no photos. Still, that didn't keep me from picking this book over several others that did have nice pictures, because in the end, the content of this book superceded any other.

Best of 4.......2005-01-05

I've recently bought 4 different tea books and this is the best one I have so far. There are a lot of the expected recipes for traditional tea time fare, with some minor omissions I felt. The print left something to be desired, some of it was blurred, but if you just want to buy 1 English tea book, this is it.

Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945

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Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945
David L. Pike
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

French | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

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ASIN: 0801472563

Book Description

The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.

The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society.

Book Description

'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.' Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'A Simple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.

Customer Reviews:

It will not dissapoint you........2007-05-27

Its important to remember, that the novel is written at a time when democracy is not exactly well spread through Europe, and most of the continental countries are having a hard time trying to understand why the English shelter anarchists and Marxists and even allow them to publish their works.

No doubt that Conrad met a few of them in literary or social circles and found them amusing in their contradictions. That is why the "criminal mastermind" Mr. Verloc is portrayed more as a very lazy bourgeois than someone whose mind is set upon creating the conditions to change society.

On the other hand, Conrad is faithful to its belief on the perennial existence if not preeminence, of a dark side of the soul in everyone. So the atmosphere in which every character dwells is gloomy, sad and purposefully shows that no motivation is really beyond a person's self interest, even if you claim that you are doing it for God and country, to save the planet or your mother.

Great novel by Conrad.......2007-01-04

Anarchism was a big thing in the late 19th century and early 20th century (you can compare it with the situation of Islamic terrorism today). Several kings, presidents and other politicians were killed by anarchists during that epoch (US president McKinley and Austrian Empress Sissi was among them). Conrad's book is one of the best novels about the anarchist world, dealing with an anarchist cell working in London during that time. The protagonist, Verloc, is the head of the cell and also an informer for the police and an agent for an unnamed foreign country (thus, he is a triple agent) and his attempt to blow up the Greenwich observatory ends tragically for an unwitting member of his family. Note: Conrad amusingly says in the prologue that he never personally met an anarchist himself, but the main story is based on real events he probably picked up from the press of the time.

A Prophetic Tale.......2006-09-06

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent brought up many interesting topics for discussion. The group of motifs Conrad chose to weave into his 1907 novel is highly political in nature: Anarchist views, science, capitalism, socialism, idealization, private ownership, poverty, the police, and possibly even Muslim extremism. For a novel written when it was, in many places The Secret Agent seemed an almost prophetic tale of Mr. Verloc, a secret agent in London.

Interestingly enough, its first prophetic topic is of great importance in today's terror-stricken world, the plot of the story centering mainly on an Anarchist terrorist plot to put one of their followers, Mr. Verloc, in charge of blowing up an observatory. His method of choice, the suicide bomber, is eerily familiar to today's reader. What makes this suicide bomber plot all the more interesting are the obscure details Conrad includes that led me to question whether Verloc and his family were, in fact, Muslim. In Sir Ethelred and the Assistant Commissioner's chapter ten discussion, the Assistance Commissioner's thoughts question the country's domestic policy and focus on his battle against the "paynim (heathen/Muslim) Cheeseman," which is Verloc. Toward the end, Conrad describes Mrs. Verloc as walking around town covered in black except for her eyes. These two details combine to add a Muslim thread to this already visionary terrorist suicide bombing plot in London, curiously reminiscent of recent world events.

Stevie's comments to Mrs. Verloc on the taxi were intriguing as well, receiving new life from the recent New Orleans natural disaster. Stevie's sympathy for the poor taxi driver and poor horse lead him to wonder why the police don't fight to stop injustice. Mrs. Verloc's response, "They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn't take anything away from them who have" is followed by Stevie's question of "What, not even if they were hungry?" The way the media portrayed and the police responded to the "looting" in New Orleans was the answer to Stevie's question: "Yes, that's the police's job even if the poor are hungry."

The Secret Agent, even though nearly a century old, brings to the forefront topics that seem to our world today fairly new. The details connect with the reader because of their strange relevance, spurring conversation about the various topics listed above.

Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

This act of madness and despair.......2005-09-04

This novel is confusing, melodramatic and contains too many improbable developments.

Its main character, Verloc, considers himself as an anarchist, although his role is 'the protection of the social mechanism', because 'protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury'.
As an 'agent provocateur' for a foreign country, he is forced (otherwise he looses his job) to organize a terrorist attack, which should 'waken up the middle classes' against 'unhygienic labour' in Great-Britain.
He is also a spy on revolutionary activities of a small club of leftists fanatics (a combination of marxists and anarchists).

Conrad's superlative style is everything except subtle: 'the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour' and 'the poor, pathetically mendacious, miserably authenticated by the horrible breath of cheap rum and soap-suds', seem to contradict a 'bad world for poor people'.
The writing is sloppy. One time, an organization is called the Central Red Committee, another time, the International Red Committee. A 'Central' Committee seems rather bizarre for anarchists ('I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.')

A dialogue between a police chief and a pure anarchist ('looking for the blow to open the first crack in the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society') seems improbable, as well as the short love story between Verloc's wife and another anarchist, at the end.

However, certain aspects of the novel are very actual, like the use of 'a weak-minded creature with carefully indoctrinated loyalty and blind docility and devotion', to carry out the fatal terrorist attack. Also actual is the following sentence: 'the existence of secret agents should not be tolerated, as tending to augment the positive dangers of evil'.

This book has not the same high standard as Conrad's masterpieces like 'Hearth of Darkness' and 'Lord Jim'.

Only for Conrad fans.

The First Political Thriller.......2005-06-07

Joseph Conrad's novel "The Secret Agent" is referred to in many places as the prototype of today's political and espionage thrillers. Except that it's not really much of a political thriller at all. The agent of the title, Mr. Verloc, has grown complacent in his role as an informant to a foreign embassy in London and is pressured by his superiors into pulling off a shocking act of terrorism in order to prove his worth to his colleagues. The novel is mostly about the domestic repercussions that occur when things go badly wrong.

This novel effectively toys with the reader's expectations, but it does so in a somewhat dubious way. Conrad introduces several characters and sets the stage for what appears to be a thriller with political overtones: several people have a vested interest (personally or politically) in the outcome of Mr. Verloc's actions. However, none of these characters ends up being of any importance, and nearly all of them drop out of the narrative altogether. The novel ends up being much more about Mrs. Verloc than it does about anyone else (including Mr. Verloc). This effectively pulls the rug out from under the reader's feet, but I would have received more satisfaction if Conrad had been able to keep suspense alive while still juggling a larger cast of characters. Maybe I should have been ready for this narrative sleight of hand, given the novel's subtitle, "A Simple Tale," but as it was the novel didn't take focus until it was 3/4 over and by that time too late for me to shift my sympathies.

What the novel does well, however, is to give its reader a deliciously tangible sense of the seedy underworld at play in late 19th-century London. Conrad personifies the mist, funk and squalor of London until the city itself nearly becomes a character in the action. Also, for anyone who maybe knows Conrad for being an obtuse, thick writer (especially if your previous knowledge of him comes from reading "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim"), "The Secret Agent" is refreshingly straight forward.

Average customer rating:

The human heart: a fist wrapped in blood
The play v. film version
more analytical approach..
Question...
exciting book

Closer
Patrick Marber
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

United States | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0802136451
Release Date: 1999-11-19

Book Description

In Closer, Patrick Marber has created a brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance, where a quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal. Closer is being hailed as one of the best new plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

Customer Reviews:

The human heart: a fist wrapped in blood.......2007-06-17

There is a wonderful line in Patrick Marber's "Closer," one of a great many, in which one character asks, "Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!" That line perfectly sums up Marber's play, which has become something of a contemporary classic since it hit stages in 1997. "Closer" is a cynic's love story, the tale of four strangers whose lives interweave as they fall in and out of love with each other over the course of years. There's Dan, the obituarist who dreams of becoming a writer; Anna, the photographer who tries not to dream; Alice, the stripper who just wants to be loved; and Larry, the dermatologist who watches it all with a devious eye.

"Closer" was made into a woefully misunderstood and truthfully stellar film by director Mike Nichols, with perfect casting (Jude Law as Dan, Julia Roberts as Anna, Natalie Portman as Alice, Clive Owen as Larry), but Marber's play is still better. It's everything a play should be: observant, amusing, realistic, and above all else, thoughtful. Most animals don't stay with one partner through their entire life, and what are humans but animals? Can we ever truly find our "soulmates," or are we meant to just drift in and out of love throughout our lives? If Marber knows, he doesn't show it. "Closer" is one great, big, hard-hitting question, spoken by Alice: "Why isn't love enough?"

I must admit, I'm not much of a fan of the stage. Previously, only the work of Tennessee Williams had really impressed me. But Patrick Marber's "Closer" is playwriting perfection. It's impeccably structured and loaded with no-holds-barred, simply brilliant dialogue. Regardless of your opinions of theatre, or even if you've never read a play before, I would highly recommend "Closer."

The play v. film version.......2007-03-14

Contains spoilers: I was blown away by the film, and couldn't wait to read the play, assuming that it would be even better. Overall I liked the film better. I've read that Clive Owen is one to pare his lines, and doing this in the film improved Larry, making him more sympathetic. The script does, however, have details that I wish had been included in the film. I thought Julia Roberts was outstanding as Anna, but Anna's character in the play seems more fleshed out, and I loved it that she and Larry divorced and she got a dog to love! Alice/Jane's film character, as played by Natalie Portman, was riveting, but I wish they'd included the stuff about her scar in the film. I just didn't like Dan's character in either version, but I have to say that I thought Jude Law was brilliant in the part of Dan, and a perfect antagonist to Clive Owen's Larry.

more analytical approach.........2006-11-22

This has to be one of the most thought-provoking play and movie I have seen in a while. I love that it is completely honest, and exaggerates our own human desires. It shows us what we are capable of. I think Alice is a representative of every young impressionable girl, wanting to be someone, anyone. She expresses young inner desire. Anna is a representative of an older woman, but she still shows how no matter how much you have been through, desire and lust still happen, and maybe we don't really learn from all of our mistakes. I think there is a piece of everyone in each character, and they just represent who we really are when we take our barriers away. This play continues to amaze me.

DAN. What do you want ?
ALICE. To be loved.
DAN. That simple ?
ALICE. It's a big want.

Question..........2006-10-01

Hey. Not really a review, but I want to get the royalties for this show. Who holds this? I can't find it anywhere. Samuel French and Bakers don't hold the rights. Who does?

exciting book.......2006-03-13

very good work. makes you feel the turns life can take with the choices you make.

The Language of Humour (Intertext (London, England).)

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i say, i say, i say

The Language of Humour (Intertext (London, England).)
Alison Ross
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Satire, General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Linguistics | Words & Language | Reference | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0415169127

Book Description

The Language of Humour: br * examines the importance of the social context for humour br * explores the issue of gender and humour in areas such as the New Lad culture in comedy and stand-up comedy br * includes comic transcripts from TV sketches such as Clive Anderson and Peter Cook

Customer Reviews:

i say, i say, i say.......2000-10-19

though i have not read the book,it seems very entertaining.can you please send me an excerpt on the title"my mother in law?"because i usually like reading an excerpt before i buy any book.and i'm very much interested in buying this book.

Book Description

Virginia Woolf was already an accomplished novelist and critic when she was commissioned by the British edition of Good Housekeeping to write a series entitled "Six Articles on London Life." Originally published bimonthly, beginning in December 1931, five of the essays were eventually collected and published in 1981. The sixth essay, "Portrait of a Londoner," had been missing from Woolf's oeuvre until it was rediscovered at the University of Sussex in 2004. Ecco is honored to publish the complete collection in the United States for the first time.

A walking tour of Woolf's beloved hometown, The London Scene begins at the London Docks and follows Woolf as she visits several iconic sites throughout the city, including the Oxford Street shopping strip, John Keats's house on Hampstead Heath, Thomas Carlyle's house in Chelsea, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament.

These six essential essays capture Woolf at her best, exploring modern consciousness through the prism of 1930s London while simultaneously painting an intimate, touching portrait of this sprawling metropolis and its fascinating inhabitants.

Customer Reviews:

Essays on a London in the past........2006-11-05

I enjoy reading about London and this book just fit the bill.

The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary

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The Bloomsbury Group
not yet

The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary

Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Irish | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Wales | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0802076408

Book Description

Bloomsbury, wrote E.M. Forster in 1929, 'is the only genuine movement in English civilization.' By this time the group's influence had been extended from fiction, biography, economics, and painting through literary, social, and art criticism to publishing and journalism. Partly as a result of its influence, Bloomsbury has been widely misunderstood as a cultural, social, and even sexual phenomenon by both its friends and its detractors. As S.P. Rosenbaum observes in the foreword to this revised and expanded edition, Bloomsbury cannot be reduced to a creed or argued away because of its complexity. 'What Bloomsbury stood for is what they were and what they did,' he writes, 'That is why a collection of descriptions of the Bloomsbury's lives and works may be the only wholly satisfactory way of defining the Bloomsbury Group.'

The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.

Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography.

Customer Reviews:

The Bloomsbury Group.......2000-01-26

to Emma Ohara of uk re names of Bloomsbury Group:the main ones are Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner (an original member from Cambridge), also you could include Carrington, Roger Fry, David (Bunny) Garnett, Desmond McCarthy,Ralph Partridge, Frances Marshall (Partridge), Ottoline Morrell, Adrian Stephen, Alix and James Strachey. I hope this helps-they are fascinating people well worth exploring

not yet.......2000-01-17

i have not yet read this book but would like to now the names of the 12 members of the blooms bury set please send it to my e-mail address

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It creeps up on you, it does.
Home is where the heart is
this play shows its age
Family Reunion to Avoid
It's Theatre of the Absurd, people!

The Homecoming
Harold Pinter
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0802151051

Customer Reviews:

It creeps up on you, it does........2007-01-26

Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (Grove, 1965)

I spent the first act of this effort from our most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature thinking "my, this is all well and good, but what is it about this play that had everyone telling me this needs to be the first Pinter I read?" Then came act two, and I understood it.

The Homecoming starts off (as you might expect given that first paragraph) unassumingly enough; a man and his wife of six years return to his ancestral home. His brothers, uncle, and father live there, and are meeting his wife for the first time; the brothers, roustabouts both of them, act a bit oddly (well, actually, a bit naturally) around the wife at first, but there's nothing terribly out of the ordinary. In fact, there's a surprising lack of family tension; the normally prickly father welcomes his wayward son home with open arms.

Then, of course, everything goes to pot in the most entertaining manner possible. I have spent years reading thousands of volumes wondering why it is that everyone has to over-emote; The Homecoming is the absolute, perfect antithesis, and I spent the entire second act wishing that these characters inhabited at least half the novels I've read in the past decade. They're deliciously perverse, and so very deadpan about it. Now, while Pinter is busy creating these characters and putting them into interesting situations (and the situations are interesting enough that the entire play can take place in a single room), he's offering some excellent satire on the family dynamic, but Pinter is talented enough to let the satire speak for itself while he concentrates on the story at hand, the mark of a man who knows how to write.

This is very good stuff, and I'll definitely be diving farther into Pinter in the coming years. *** ½

Home is where the heart is.......2005-11-07

5 stars going on 10. It will take me weeks to digest this one. Little bit of a surprise, eh? So Pinter is not just a political campaigner.

The quality of the dialogue knocked me off my feet. Conventions seem well-established but aren't quite the expected conventions. The family is close but not quite the expected closeness. This is hardly a dysfunctional family: it's just a family not functioning as you might have been taught a family should.

I recently watched the 1973 American Film Theatre performance of this play on VHS. Vivian Merchant, who also starred in the American Film Theatre's version of Jean Genet's "The Maids", plays Ruth in "The Homecoming". How to expect a better cast? In the hands of those incredible actors, this play slammed into me. It will take me days to find suitable words to describe what hit me. Unlike the plays of Pinter's friend Beckett, "The Homecoming" can't be dismissed as Theatre of the Absurd. Not that there isn't absurdity, but that Pinter works hard to interwine it with familiar daily routines.

No boring moments. At the beginning the hostilities seemeed contrived but very soon a lot more was going on. Most of us aren't as creative as this family in finding a way to make the family work ... and most of us probably wouldn't want to be. But they are close and not just because of what they share during this visit. The father especially struck me as rising above his angers to find a love (however unconventional) for his sons and that warmth became unmistakeable as the play progressed. No? Well, something special is going on in "The Homecoming" and I'll probably need many passes to understand what it is. But, with such rich dialogue, many passes seem warranted.

this play shows its age.......2002-01-30

This play caused a great controversial stir when it was first performed in 1965. This is supposed to be a classic example of an existentialist and absurdist play. It was Pinter's first stage play and the one that made his reputation. Although it was very daring and shocking in 1965, the play has aged and lost its freshness and original power, in my opinion. There are many other portrayals of dysfunctional families that have retained their freshness and power--such families have been a mainstay of drama from the time of the ancient Greeks. Shakespeare and even fairy tales have built themselves around exploring the dark and abusive aspects of the family dynamic. So Pinter's on to nothing new or radical here. The script as such is blatantly misogynist. The one female role, Ruth, has no lines that sound human--she comes across as a stilted android. Ruth is so obviously not a real woman but a male projection of lust, fear, possession, hate, and paranoia. I recently saw this play performed in Manchester, UK, and have to wonder why people still think this play, with all its misogynist posturing, is relevant to a contemporary audience. If it were just a black absurd comedy, it might have worked better for me, but Pinter seems to be aiming at something deeper and more menacing yet can't seem to make up his mind if we're supposed to be feeling sympathy with his characters or taking them (and the underlying meaning of the play) seriously or not.

Family Reunion to Avoid.......2001-07-31

Pinter at his darkest and most experimental.

This play's first and second acts are of equal length down to the line.

Sexual deviance, abuse, name calling, assault and torture: these are the norm. These people make the rest of our families seem pretty good. The play is twisted and as much a psychological journey as anything else.

Pinter lives up the claim that his plays were like, "Beckett in doors," with this one. Though most of Pinter's plays have a dark edge to them, this one may even cross over the line, if you are paying close attention to what is really going on.

Worth reading at least twice, after the shock from the first time through, the second read (if read closely), becomes even darker and more forbidding.

Wonderfully written, and further proof that Pinter is one of the masters of modern British drama.

It's Theatre of the Absurd, people!.......2000-11-22

I agree that this play could be viewed at totally crazy, but it's supposed to. I really loved this play. I think Pinter has an excellent way of making us step back, and be disgusted and enjoy a show at the same time.

It's not supposed to have a beginning, middle, or an end. It is more like real life than realism is. It's not a life full of 'Drama,'it's more like real life, only we can find it funny because it's not happening to us.

Book Description

In 1928, Agatha Christie—the world's most widely read author—was a thirty-something single mother. With her first marriage falling apart, she has decided to take a much-needed holiday—the Caribbean has been her intended destination, but her mind was changed during a dinner conversation, and five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory.

Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tell a riveting tale and reveals fascinating and little-known details of this exotic chapter in the life Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad—a journey much more difficult in 2002, with the political unrest in the Middle East, than it was in 1928—becomes ineluctably intertwined with Christie's, and the characters he meets seem like they could have stepped out of a mystery novel.

Fans of Agatha Christie will delight in Eames's descriptions of the places and events that appeared in and influenced her fiction, and armchair travelers will thrill in the exotica of the journey itself.

Customer Reviews:

Like it.......2007-09-10

I bought this book for my Mum because she loves Christie and ended up reading it myself. I was especially taken by the sections in Eastern Europe and Iraq. This book introduced me to places in geography and history that I had not been to before and was a pleasant and thought-provoking read.

Captures people, place, and time vividly--well recommended.......2007-08-06

Why would anyone still read a travelogue in this, the beginning of the 21st century, when it was so easy to find outstanding independent film travel documentaries, many prepared by only one or two individuals at most? Certainly this visual medium combined with well-edited documentary realism and well-scripted travel guide dialog would serve better than print for the purpose of introducing a novice to a new culture, people, or place. But a modern-day print-based travelogue was what our book club leader assigned for our next book. That is how I came to read "The 8:55 to Baghdad" by Andrew Eames. I am glad I did.

In 2003, on the eve of the second Gulf War, seasoned English travel-writer Andrew Eames retraced the famous train trip that Agatha Christie made 75 years earlier on the Orient Express from London to Baghdad. Thus this book is a delightful hybrid--part history and biography of Christie, part travelogue concerning a unique trip through parts of the world where few Westerners choose to travel, and part transcribed candid conversations with strangers and interviews with local dignitaries that the author hooked up with during this travels.

Thankfully, Eames knew better than to bore us with the familiar. Most of the travelogue deals primarily with the wholly unique--parts of the trip where the typical Western traveler has little to no experience. I am speaking of countries like Croatia, Serbia, Syria, and Iraq, as well as little travel portions of Hungary and Turkey.

Personally, I was only mildly interested in the Christie history. What interested me most was the candid conversations that the author was able to have with strangers everywhere along his travels. These conversations often open up a whole new perspective on world politics. Eames was able to pick up some amazingly straightforward points of view about important topics from complete strangers. This is what kept me glued to the book.

Take for example:

1) The conversation Eames had with a Belgrade businessman who genuinely felt that what Serbia needed was another war in order to jump start its stagnant economy. The man says: "Today, Serbia is old news. Now there's 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we're not important any more. Everyone's left or leaving and all the money is going elsewhere. That's why we need another war. To bring back the budgets." The author politely inquires against who the war should be. "Dunno. Someone will pop up. They always do" (p. 141).

2) The conversation Eames had with a fellow train traveler in rural Turkey about President Bush: "You have traveled. I have traveled. We understand each other. But President Bush? Has he traveled? What is that expression--travel broadens the mind? I wonder if he would still be demonizing the Islamic world if he'd come here on his holidays" (p. 205). A few pages later, while the author is still conversing with the same Turkish passenger, they start talking about Iraq. The man says: " Iraq will probably be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but the war must not go on for too long. Might is only right for a limited time; look at Genghis Khan. Justice, that is the important thing. If the U.S. treats Iraq with justice, then I don't think there'll be any backlash from here. But if America shows itself to be greedy, then it'll be a problem. A real problem." Then the conversation turns naturally to Israel and we get this candid comment: "There you see it, comes the problem of justice. There is no justice, not for the people of Palestine. For them Israel sets the parameters and inflicts the penalties. Imagine if a foreign power claimed the heart of London, and you could do nothing because it had a big, powerful bully of a friend. Well...I have Jewish friends, but we can't talk about it. It is such an injustice, and it is deeply felt elsewhere in the world. Deeply felt" (p. 209).

3) Or the conversation he had with a Canadian engineer on the border between Turkey and Syria. Eames asks the man if he thinks there is going to be a war. The man who builds grain silos for a living says that he does not think so, "Don't think the Syrians do either. How could there be, with so little pretext?" But what about the oil, the author asks. "No way; Even Big George wouldn't do anything so cynical. No, I tell you what...I predict that water, not oil, will be the next big justification for war. The Syrian aquifers are going down at a rate of fifteen feet a year. That's serious for Syria, and it's even more serious for Iraq...you know what Mesopotamia means? It means land between two rivers. The Tigris and the Euphrates. They both originate in the mountains of Turkey. Without those two rivers Iraq would not, could not exist." They go on to discuss the Turkish Central Anatolian Project to construct 20 dams on the Euphrates and the Tigris by the year 2020. "Those dams will pull the plug on Iraq...the poor buggers will die of thirst. They don't have any other source of water" (p. 251-2).

If you like reading that kind of candid dialogue, you'll love this book. I did, and it opened my eyes.

EXQUISITE NOSTALGIA FOR TRAIN LOVERS.......2007-03-02

By Mark V. Rose, author of BANGKOK, OH BOY!
Andrew Eames' THE 8:55 TO BAGHDAD evokes exquisite nostalgia for train lovers in search of exotic destinations. But Eames does much more. He personally traveled the same rail routes taken by Agatha Christie as she developed ideas for Murder on the Orient Express and many other popular mystery novels often while traversing Europe to Istanbul, Syria and finally Iraq. Simply, it is a traveler's treat.
Years after the famed mystery writer's own far-reaching travels, Eames, took his travel cues from Christie's autobiography and memoir. While the train cars had long ago been replaced or refurbished, the terrain remained similar enough, and in some areas such as Bulgaria, Serbia still remained the same. Eames stayed in hotels where Agatha had, walked the same streets and even talked with several people who had met her--one in Aleppo, the other in Ljubljana.
Given the relative slowness of trains in today's fast-paced world and the comfort and ambience of the coach's interiors, Eames recreates the sense of leisure that Christie must have felt, almost to the point of giving a sense that time has stood still. It was probably that very freedom that allowed Christie to think about what she would eventually write about.
Besides interesting, brief, useful historical backgrounds of the countries he passes through, Eames supplies enticing illustrations and maps, helping the reader to feel a part of the journey. One learns much from Eames' generous narrative. Given Christie's adventurous spirit, it is not too surprising that she sometimes traveled alone. For me, the most astonishing information is that her first solo voyage in 1928 followed the disappointing end of her first marriage to Archie Christie. Perhaps the Orient Express would ease the sad and lonely young author's pain as her philandering husband had just divorced her to marry another woman. She took the 8:55 out of London for Baghdad. It is in the figurative sense, as one train never went all the way, Istanbul being the last stop on the Express which she had boarded on the continent. From Turkey travelers take yet another "Express".
Christie more than succeeded in her quest to discover "what sort of person I was--whether I had become entirely dependent . . ." Through friends in Iraq she met her second husband Max Mallowan--an archeologist thirteen years her junior whose life and work she happily shared. They spent many winters on important digs in both Syria and Iraq. Eames reports that Christie adored working in archeology, quoting from her archeological memoir COME TELL ME HOW YOU LIVE if she had not become a writer that would have been her profession. Eames did his amazing homework and then some! Highly recommended. MARK ROSE, Author BANGKOK, OH BOY!

Appeals on many levels........2006-09-08

Part travelogue, part history (of the Balkans and the Middle East, most notably), part Agatha Christie biography, the book satisfied this reader on all three levels. Eames sometimes tried too hard to coin meaningful metaphors, but those instances were easy to overlook. What wasn't easy to overlook was his mis-categorization of Syria as part of President Bush's axis of evil which, as far I know know, included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It seems that would have been a relatively easy fact to check. One suggestion for any future editions would be to include more maps, perhaps one at the head of each chapter. Overall, an extremely enjoyable read.

Good stuff.......2005-11-01

This wonderful piece of travel literature is a good quick, fun, enlightening read. It follows the Orient express from London, to Trieste, through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and on to Iraq. Many interesting people are met along the way and the fascinating history of the various countries is told in a new fresh light. Also Agatha Christies `secret' life is brought to light. Topics include, sex in Serbia, Tsar Boris and his love for trains, genocide in Croatia, and the history of Trieste and the Orient Express. A wonderful book, that makes excellent reading as a companion to any trip to eastern Europe or Turkey as well as a good companion on any trip.

Seth J. Frantzman

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