Not Prince Hamlet: A Life In Literary And Theatrical London

by Michael Meyer

Michael Meyer's translations of Strindberg and Ibsen have often been described as definitive, as have his biographies of both writers. His Strindberg translations made him the first Englishman to receive the Gold Medal of the Swedish Academy, and his life of Ibsen won the Whitbread Biography prize. He has now turned his attention to his own life and his friendships with some of this century's most famous literary and theatrical names.

Paperback

First published October 4, 1990

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Michael Leverson Meyer (11 June 1921 – 3 August 2000) was an English translator, biographer, journalist and dramatist.

Meyer was born in London into a timber merchant family of Jewish origin, and studied English at Christ Church College, Oxford. His first translation of a Swedish book was the novel The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, published by Collins in 1954. He is best known for his translations of the works of two Scandinavian playwrights, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Braham Murray wrote of Meyer in his obituary published by The Guardian that Meyer was "the greatest translator of Ibsen and Strindberg into English there has ever been" even superior to William Archer, but Inga-Stina Ewbank and especially Jan Myrdal has criticizes the mistranslations, where Myrdal tries to prove that they are made deliberately. Myrdal also strongly criticizes Meyer's biography of Strindberg.

Meyer's journalism appeared in the New York Review of Books. He also wrote acclaimed biographies of both these playwrights; the three volume work on Ibsen (1967–71) won the 1971 Whitbread Award for Biography and the work on Strindberg appeared in 1985. His autobiography Not Prince Hamlet was published in 1989.

Reviews

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven autobiography from an important person in the theatre, especially in the UK - writer of groundbreaking translations of Ibsen and Strindberg into English. He knew everyone in the London theatre world, and that is in part the strength of this book and in part its major weakness. Too often it feels like name-dropping for the sake of it, and when this reaches the point of lists of people he saw in stage productions from his notebook, becomes singularly pointless. He does fairly often have interesting stories to tell about people, from H.G. Wells onwards. The best bit is the final chapter, a series of reminiscences of Ralph Richardson, who is an amusingly eccentric person. It is rather detached from the rest of the book, and could well be a piece he wrote for another occasion which was just stuck on the end of the otherwise chronological tale.