Friday, January 7, 2011

Confessions of a Shakespeare Prof

I have not read all of Shakespeare.

There, my confession. What can I say? How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem some of those works. And I have my favorites, like Hamlet. LOVE HAMLET. I think I’ve read it 50 times or more.

But not the Merry Wives of Windsor. It seems to me to be such a silly play, and not Shakespeare at his best. I’ve ready The Comedy of Errors, for example, and regret wasting that time. Oh, there are some tidbits to be gleaned, to be sure. But why read plays like that when you could read Hamlet or King Lear again?

Did I mention I named one of my children after a Shakespeare character? His name is Lear? More on that later.