Shakespeare on Love: A Personal Selection by Simon Callow Book

Alain de Botton has already explained to us How Proust can Change your Life, and now Simon Callow tells us how Shakespeare can change your love life in his charming personal selection of Shakespeare's various celebrations of love, in Shakespeare on Love. "If music be the food of love, play on," says the lovesick Orsino in Twelfth Night, and Callow provides plenty food for thought in his selections. In a short and pithy introduction he remarks that "in making the selection for this volume, I was struck by how widely the notion of love appears in Shakespeare's work, by no means solely confined to the amorous or the sexual sphere". As a result, interspersed among selections on "Falling in Love", "Love Gone Wrong", and "Love Embraced", we have "The Many Forms of Love", including love of a brother from Hamlet, love of children from Macbeth, and even love of dogs from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The selections are also supplemented by Callow's wonderfully portentous thoughts on particular passages and characters, and the whole volume is illustrated with other 50 thoughtfully chosen Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. --Lucy SnoweRead More