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Product DescriptionThe Happy Alchemy in this delightful book blends witty entertainment with thought-provoking instruction. Touching on everything from Shakespeare’s Falstaff to Canada’s constitutional wrangles (“our own version of a civil war”) and from “How I Write a Book” to Richard Wagner, “that extraordinary genius and dreadful crook,” this is in every way a worthy companion to The Merry Heart.This book also draws on the polished but unpublished speeches, book reviews, and other articles that Robertson Davies left behind. Here, too, the book’s editors, Jennifer Surridge and Brenda Davies, have produced tantalizing quotes from his private diaries to help introduce each of the book’s thirty-three pieces of prose (and verse, libretto, and even screenplay).Most of the pieces deal with the theatre – from the day-long ancient Greek drama festivals “with an audience of 17,000 Athenians looking on,” through Shakespeare’s theatre and on to Davies’ own youthful “Prologue to The Good Natur’d Man” (accepted at the Old Vic as pure Oliver Goldsmith), to his beloved nineteenth-century theatre and melodrama.Since, in his words, “melodrama lives in our opera houses,” it is a short step from there to his passion for opera and from Verdi to the surprising confessions of “My Musical Career.” Many readers will be astonished by his knowledgeable enthusiasm for folk-song; few by his acknowledgement of his great debt to C.G. Jung in his work. At the end of this stimulating and revealing book he returns to his love of the theatre and his admiration for the great playwrights, summed up in his haunting final line “…and I applaud them across the centuries.”Across the years the distinctive, absolutely unmistakable voice of Robertson Davies will continue to ring out from these pages.About the AuthorRobertson Davies was born and raised in Ontario and was educated at a variety of schools, Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: first as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; then as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner; and most recently as a university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981.He was without doubt one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with over thirty books to his credit, among them several volumes of plays, as well as collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres. As a novelist he gained fame far beyond Canada’s borders, especially for his Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, and for his last five novels, The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus, Murther & Walking Spirit, and The Cunning Man.His career was marked by many honours: he was, for example, the first Canadian to become an honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and Honorary Fellow of Balliol, and received an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford.Robertson Davies passed away in 1995.
