Description
Book SynopsisA gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways.
Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility.
Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life?
King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after
Table of Contents
Preface | ix
1 Father Uncertain. King Lear | 1
2 Athens Scrambled. A Midsummer Night’s Dream | 33
3 Mothers and Sons. Coriolanus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, Hamlet | 73
4 Faith Awakened. The Winter’s Tale | 109
5 Queer. As You Like It, the Sonnets, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night | 149
6 The Royal and the Real. Richard II | 176
Readings | 207
Acknowledgments | 213
Index | 215
Photographs follow page 104
