This felt like two separate books. The first half is a light introductory overview of the history of theater supplemented by selected short biographical sketches of major playwrights from the periods covered. As such it’s a good introduction to the development of drama’s place in society.

The second half is an odd assortment of quirky theater related facts and anecdotes that doesn’t really add anything to the earlier work - in fact it feels like it undermines the previous history with trivialities. ( )

The book tries to connect Shakespeare’s works to masterpieces of Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre and to present the circumstances that became the influence and the context of his plays. Arguably, the research is there on the part of the author, but there is nothing new in this attempt. There is nothing we don’t know, nothing we haven’t read before in much better books through a vastly better writing.

The author’s sarcastic humor regarding certain ancient Greek tragedies is hardly appropriate. A lame attempt to sound ‘’smart’’, but all he succeeds in is to come across as disrespectful. At first, I thought this was some kind of aversion towards Classical Antiquity in general, but no. The same tone continues for the majority of the book and I felt as if I was reading an essay by a teenager under the influence of too much reprimanding talk who simply had had enough and decided to ditch everything, essays, projects and all.

There was nothing obscure, no dark secret, as the cover proclaims. Everybody knows the origin of phrases like ‘’The Scottish Play’’ or ‘’Break a leg’’. Everybody but the writer who needs to get his facts straight in one or two occasions...Even the supposedly haunting theaters that he mentions are far from ‘’obscure’’.

It is one thing to feel the need to create a text that will be approachable to young people and another to resort to crude jokes and completely silly, amateurish assumptions. A frightfully disappointing read that didn’t even worth the time...I finished it out of a sheer sadistic desire to see how far he would go to appear ‘’clever’’...

ARC from Edelweiss
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Book received from Edelweiss.

This book is mostly soundbites of the history of theater. It starts with Ancient Greek plays and goes on to explain how it evolved to the theater of today. Parts of it weren't that interesting to me, but others ticked all the boxes, especially once it started on the British and their actors. I enjoyed it enough to try out more of this authors work. ( )