Be Thou Now Persuaded: Living In A Shakespearean World [Spoken Word]

Be Thou Now Persuaded may convince you of certain things--e.g., that Richard Burton and John Barrymore are as overrated interpreters of Shakespeare as Anthony Quayle and Albert Finney are underrated; or that if a little Shakespeare is good, a lot is not necessarily better--but it is by no means the audio equivalent of Harold Bloom's bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the delightful polemic that inspired it. Where Bloom proceeds systematically through the bard's theatrical canon, Persuaded organizes some 180 Shakespearean sound bites, ranging from seconds to minutes in length, on four CDs thematically devoted to death, love, violence, and the beyond, respectively. (Two other discs contain Romeo and Juliet in its entirety.) Selected from among film adaptations and audio recordings, the best of the decontextualized fragments render full-length scenes and soliloquies, while the shorter ones would probably be great filler for your next mix tape. --Richard Gehr