摘要:This is a big handsome book, written to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Bell Shakespeare Company, although it is mostly an overview of John Bell’s fifty years as an actor/director. It contains twenty-seven photographs of Bell Shakespeare productions, with a grand picture of John Bell as Richard III on the dust jacket, and with chapter headings that make clear where other matters break into the chronological and other sequences. However, were this work called My life with/in Shakespeare or John Bell’s Shakespeare it would more exactly represent what it is about, as it is not so much On Shakespeare as a theatrical autobiography of an actor/director who loves Shakespeare, who acted in the United Kingdom, set up the Bell Shakespeare Company after his return to Australia and who gives us his opinions of other actors and directors, of Shakespeare himself, his contemporaries and the times in which he lived, and on how directors and actors should approach playing Shakespeare, but who also has a distinctive idiosyncratic view of how the plays should be staged.