I was stuck on what one character should’ve been doing. I shelved the book I was writing, which was accustomed to neglect by then, and it was just as well. I didn’t, because that would’ve been impossible even if those plays were the only thing I taught that semester, and I had three other unrelated classes. I picked some plays and tried to read everything ever written about them. Probably, maybe, but the plays in my head took his advice.ĭespite lack of expertise, I was (once, in a pinch) tasked with teaching a college course on Shakespeare. “That moment was metafictional-he was being sarcastic!” experts will protest. The performances I’ve seen do what Hamlet explicitly tells actors not to: scream like town-criers, stressing all the wrong words and winking to signal puns. The only Hamlet I’ve liked was Iain Glen in the movie adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead. I’m a fan of reading the plays, not watching or hearing them, a statement most Shakespeare experts deem profane. The multiple Oxford, Arden, or Cambridge editions never agree with each other about a stage direction’s “authenticity.” Then there’s Harold Bloom’s old-guard-turned-hot takes, Steven Pinker’s framing of Shakespeare as a psychologist, and a book worth reading, Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All (enlightening, comprehensive, and readable).Īll this is to say: I’m not an expert on Shakespeare. By the sixth line in an 1866 New Variorum edition of Othello, the commentators are waging a footnote battle with a word count threatening to eclipse the play’s. Expertise is evasive, but not for lack of trying.
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