Reviews for Louis Dalton and the Abbey Theatre

The average rating for Louis Dalton and the Abbey Theatre based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-03 00:00:00 Eric Burroughs The late Eric Sams, World War II codebreaker and later a civil servant and musicologist, was not of the academy and therefore prepared to overturn, with infectious glee, many an ossified and false perception of Shakespeare. In The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564-1594 he pursues with impeccable logic the heretical notion that Shakespeare's early work might have been less the product of mature genius than of apprentice ambition, and that some of it survives in manuscript and anonymous publication, and recovers for the canon two whole plays (Edmund Ironside and Edward III). He also convincingly claims for Shakespeare works he was previously thought not to have written but only reworked, like the thrilling "bad quarto" of Hamlet and The Taming of a Shrew (with its completed "induction"). Sams makes the journey more exciting than any detective fiction.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-08 00:00:00 Brenda Wilson These are a very cordial 3 stars - I liked this book a lot but the fact of it being a near verbatim memoir meant that it didn't have a great arc or drive or anything that made it a fantastic book. Furthermore, the life of a regular lady and guy over the course of 20th century Ireland is not a subject that appeals to every reader (but it does to me!). I thought it was great, without trying to do too much or encylopedically covering everything or really universalizing anything at all... Roddy Doyle sat down with his parents and let them say what they want and then wrote it down, and it works. Their respective happy, fairly simple childhoods, their early adulthoods (and their awesome first meeting -- Ita thought Roddy was too drunk and wasn't interested at all, but he proved himself the next week), and their marriage, home-buying, the births of their children, tragedies and joys, and family ties that remained important throughout the decades. It's not like they have the perfect love story, or incredibly edifying lives, or were fantastic in any way, but they were smart and nice and had fun, and that's just how it should be, and it was really nice to read about that. Way to be a good kid, Roddy