Book Description

A 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 you, to your life, to your sensibility. Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that traces the surprising and profound ways reading, teaching, acting, directing, and writing about Shakespeare has informed and shaped his life. Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is about Shakespeare and about Barkan, but to an even greater extent, it’s about reading. 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? Seen this way, Shakespeare becomes not only the material upon which an experienced and learned literary professional exercises his scholarly craft but also a record of the author's own life: a father with a painful secret, a mother who progressed from a flapper in the twenties to a divorcée in the thirties to an eccentrically lovable parent to the child she bore unexpectedly in middle age. King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Volumnia to Gertrude and even Lady Macbeth are all reconsidered in the light of the author’s experience as a son. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. The Winter’s Tale becomes a story about the ways in which beauty is superior to truth. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is interpreted through the author’s joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul’s Drag Race in an encounter between realness and royalness. Full of engrossing stories, and written with humor and genuine excitement about the written word, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare’s plays come alive in new ways.