Shakespeare and I

Description

Following the ethos and ambition of the Shakespeare NOW! series, and harnessing the energy, challenge and vigour of the 'minigraph' form, Shakespeare and I is a provocative appeal and manifesto for a more personal form of criticism. A number of the most exciting and authoritative writers on Shakespeare examine and scrutinise their deepest, most personal and intimate responses to Shakespeare's plays and poems, to ask themselves if and how Shakespeare has made them the person they are. Their responses include autobiographical histories, reflections on their relationship to their professional, institutional or familial roles and meditations on the person-making force of religious or political conviction. A blog at http://shakespearenowseries.blogspot.com enables both contributors and readers to continue the debate about why Shakespeare keeps us reading and what that means for our lives today. The book aims to inspire readers to think and write about their ever-changing personal relationship with Shakespeare: about how the poems and plays - and writing about them - can reveal or transform our sense of ourselves.

William McKenzie has taught at University College London and King's College London, UK.

"The ambitious project of the Shakespeare NOW series is to bridge the gap between 'scholarly thinking and a public audience' and 'public audience and scholarly thinking'. Scholars are encouraged to write in a way accessible to a general readership and readers to rise to the challenge and not be afraid of new ideas and the adventure they offer. There are other bridges the series is ambitious to cross: 'formal, political or theoretical boundaries' - history and philosophy, theory, and performance." English Vol. 58, 2009 '...a new critical anthology that makes a clear and badly needed intervention in today's world of academic Shakespeare scholarship, calling for a new critical practice in which the subjectivity of the critic-scholar is itself acknowledged, represented, and made the basis for creative readings of Shakespeare's works. Just as remarkably, they have recruited their authors from some of the leading practitioners of the field, all of whom respond enthusiastically and in a variety of moods and manners, to the challenge. This is a bold and memorable collection that will certainly impact the field.' -- Hugh Grady, Professor of English, Arcadia University, USA, and author of Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics 'These essays - frank, intensely personal, even confessional - in which eminent critics meditate on the deepest sources of their engagement with the dramatist add a new and profoundly revealing dimension to Shakespeare criticism.' -- Professor Stanley Wells, CBE, Honorary President, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, UK