Book Review – ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare’
Author: J. Roland Evans – Hutchinson Press
Reviewed by Jeb Ladouceur
When my granddaughter Kimberly was most recently in Europe, specifically on an exchange student program in the U.K., she had occasion to visit Paris from her home base in London. There, Kim toured one of the world’s most famous bookstores—‘Shakespeare and Company’—on rue de la Bucherie, near Notre Dame Cathedral.
Knowing her grandfather’s appetite for anything that even smacks of The Bard and his life in Stratford upon Avon, Kimberly selected a slender 256-page volume as a gift to bring home to me when she returned to Marist College the following month. It was a book she was almost positive I had never seen … and certainly one I didn’t own. She was right.
The book is titled ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare,’ and I read it eagerly the day after Kim’s festive homecoming party here in Smithtown. Unlike most works dealing with the rather nebulous details in the life of The Bard of Avon, this one (though it’s meticulously researched fiction) tells us convincingly of things we probably would never have thought to ask historians.
The novel is dressed up in a well-fitting biographical suit, and its author, J. Roland Evans, gives the impression that he could have been the teacher at young Will Shakespeare’s school in Stratford … or a client of Will’s father, John, a glove-maker and town Mayor … or one of the itinerant actors who visited hamlets like Stratford when trying-out new plays, much as performers do in suburbia to this day.
Of course, Shakespeare was someone about whom we know relatively little, despite the fact that he was (and is) the greatest rhetorical genius that the English language has ever produced. Whether we know it or not, he coined literally thousands of the words, phrases, and homespun idioms that make up our colorful language, and which we still use on a daily basis.
It was Will Shakespeare who called jealousy ‘the green-eyed monster’ … who first referred to ‘a fool’s paradise’ … who noted ‘a foregone conclusion’ … ‘a sorry sight’ … and when something was ‘dead as a doornail’ it was the Bard of Avon who originally said so.
One of the great charms of ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare’ derives primarily from the fact that J. Roland Evans sprinkles so many of these terms and phrases appropriately throughout the dialogue in this quaint biography about history’s greatest of literary giants … expressions like ‘a full swoop’ … ‘bated breath’ … ‘bag and baggage’ … these and untold scores of similar terms are on the record right there in his plays. But it’s only when we read their applicable use by the young man who would eventually turn the phrases, and insert them forever in our vocabularies, that we can fully appreciate the skill of his biographer.
There are any number of books, movies, and yes, plays about William Shakespeare, and that is as it should be … but the Evans book that my granddaughter brought me from Paris is the only one I’ve ever seen about young Will’s childhood. Thus, for me a new light has been shone on the unparalleled wordsmith of our long literary history; the master linguist whom I studied with such fascination in college.
Those who question William Shakespeare’s authorship of the thirty-six or so plays most commonly attributed to him, generally do so on the ground that no mere schoolboy from rural Stratford, England could have grown up to be the descriptive genius who told us that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ … that ‘discretion is the better part of valor’ … or that one should ‘fight fire with fire.’
In reading J. Roland Evans’ book (a novel though it may be) we are introduced to an aspect of life in Elizabethan England we may never have considered before—that even a Stratford youngster in his pre-and-early teens … attending school from six in the morning ‘til six at night … reading the works of Cicero and Homer in the original Latin and Greek … received an education far beyond that which we consider adequate undergraduate schooling today.
As The bard himself might have said, “It’s Small Wonder” that so many of our Liberal Arts students graduate only to find themselves, “In a Pickle.” Perhaps they should “Brush up on” more books like ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare.’
Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of a dozen novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. His recent hit, THE GHOSTWRITERS, explores the bizarre relationship between the late Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Ladouceur’s newly completed thriller, THE SOUTHWICK INCIDENT, was introduced at the Smithtown Library on May 21st. The book involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com