In Our Own Image: Fictional Representations of William Shakespeare, by David Livingstone (Olomouc: Palacký University Olomouc, 2019)

Abstract

s book is an apt and enjoyable summary of the fictional accounts of Shakespeare's life from the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Partly due to recent popular cultural works such as the British sitcom Upstart Crow (2016-) and the awardwinning Shakespeare in Love (1998), the topic has received the attention of critics in recent decades (Buffey 2020;Lanier 2007;O'Sullivan 2005;Sawyer 2016), but book-length discussions are still rather rare (Franssen 2016). Livingstone's In Our Own Image fills a few gaps, but still leaves plenty of room for investigation.The book more or less follows a chronological order, insofar as it mentions a few 19 th century texts in its Introduction, starts its analytical sections with early 20 th century texts in Chapter 1, and gets to Robert Nye's Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1993) and The Late Mr. Shakespeare (1998) in Chapter 5. Chapters 6 and 7 are to some extent exceptions, as they give an overview of the popular cultural and filmic treatments of the topic. The volume is relatively chatty and anecdotal when analyzing its works, in a way similar to O'Sullivan's This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.