Where There's a Will There's a Way: Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare

I am not a self-help reader, but I do love other people's interpretations of Shakespeare. Ms. Maguire writes soulfully, humorously, and intelligently about an application of text that I had never thought of before (I particularly enjoyed the comments on Lear and "seeing better"). I would have loved to give her a perfect 5, but there were just enough digressions and slightly off-the-topic (or overly long) anecdotes that I felt a bit distracted from the course, namely, how Shakespeare helps people understand themselves better. This, though, is not a sharp criticism, and perhaps makes the actual score closer to 4.75. Her explanations, examinations, and insights are great almost all the way through. It is an accessible yet complex text, making it something worth returning to. A great book--just a little pious at parts. I know that the argument is, It's a self help book. Of COURSE it's preachy. Yeah, but...it feels a little overwhelming sometimes. Still thoroughly recommended, however.

What's so great about this book is that it uses the model of self-help with such grace and insight to write a book of literary criticism. There's no condescension here, rather an innovative guide to nuancing our understanding of Shakespeare's characterisation in the round. This is wonderfully readable - I sat up all night reading my copy - without being reductive - highly recommended to all. However much you know about Shakespeare, or about yourself, you'll get something from it.

In "Where There's a Will There's a Way: or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare, Laurie Maguire sees Shakespeare as a great psychologist. Maguire is a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where she teaches English literature. She has written numerous articles on Elizabethean drama, women's studies, and theater, and has lectured throughout the United States. "Shakespeare's plays," writes Maguire, "show us human lives in all their perplexing and unpredictable variety. They show us choices, good and bad; they show us predicaments, tragic and comic; they show us characters, complex and shallow. They show us ourselves." Indeed, argues Maguire, Shakespeare can be read as a self-help guru and life coach who places at our fingertips strategies for survival and success: "The entire Shakespeare canon," she says, "is a course in Finding Oneself 101." Her repeated imperative if for us to learn to "see better," to quote a phrase from "The Tragedy of King Lear"--to strive to see things from another's point of view. When Lear says to Kent, "Out of my sight!" Kent replies, "See better, Lear!" To illustrate this desideratum, Maguire examines Shakespeare's plays in relationship to themes such as identity, family, friends, the battle of the sexes, unrequited love, acceptance, anger, jealousy, positive thinking, forgiveness, taking risks, maturity, and loss. "So what kind of book is this?" she writes. "Is it a self-help book that draws its illustrative material from Shakespeare? Or is it an introduction to Shakespeare in the guise of a genre we all understand: self-help? The answer is: it's both. "We read self-help books for the same reason we read literature. To find solace and inspiration. To find guidance and advice. To find comfort; comfort that we are not alone, that others have shared our experience. Shakespeare and self-help will always overlap. . . . Ultimately, Shakespeare helps us take control of the plot in our own life; he helps us discover our self. . . . 'A Complete Works of Shakespeare' is the only guide to life you'll ever need." Robert Graves once said, "The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good." While reading books about Shakespeare is no substitute for reading Shakespeare himself, Maguire helps "see better" his deep wisdom, and thereby "see better" other people and ourselves. (See also my review of Colin McGinn's "Shakespeare's Philosophy.")