Reading Shakespeare Reading Me

by Leonard Barkan

Overview

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 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 planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author’s experience as a son of a former flapper. 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. 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.

Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare’s plays come alive in new ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823299195
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,122,195
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 UniversityProfessor at Princeton, where he teaches comparative literature, art history, English, and classics. His many books include The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and the Culture of Europe from Rome to the Renaissance (Princeton, 2021), Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion (Chicago, 2016), Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa.

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

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/28/2022

Princeton literature professor Barkan (The Hungry Eye) reveals in this enchanting collection the various ways Shakespeare has shaped his life. In reflecting on scenes from King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and several of the sonnets, he asks: “Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me in my life? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life?” In “Athens Scrambled,” Barkan tells of playing Bottom in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and discovering that the play requires its audience to make great leaps of faith: “If we do behave ourselves, as the onstage audience does not, then and only then will we experience the blessings that... we have all shared in a dream.” In “Faith Awakened,” he recalls being pressed by his students about his favorite Shakespeare play and concludes that it’s The Winter’s Tale because by the time it was written, Shakespeare had “done his time” trying to imitate the “Real.” Barkan’s luminous prose, his prodigious humor, and his generous readings of the plays and sonnets are a real joy. This brings tons of fun to the Bard’s oeuvre. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Barkan’s luminous prose, his prodigious humor, and his generous readings of the plays and sonnets are a real joy. This brings tons of fun to the Bard’s oeuvre.

starred review Publishers’ Weekly

. . . [T]his book should be in all libraries collecting on Shakespeare.

Choice Reviews

Enthusiastic readers know what it feels like to have an author speaking directly to oneself, as if a text was written specifically for them. Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a bibliomemoir and personal intellectual bildungsgroman in which Leonard Barkan explores a number of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of his own personal history and academic preoccupations, and vice versa... [H]e is an exquisitely sensitive reader both of them and his own biography.

Critical Inquiry

"Astonishing. . . . Hilarious. . . . The mixture of analysis and memoir works because the author participates fully in the action of reading or viewing, and because he finds parallels between his life and those of Shakespeare’s characters without looking for literal equivalences. He examines straight on and obliquely. At the end, even seasoned Shakespeareans will know more about Shakespeare than they did at the start. . . . And everyone will wish they could have studied with the man they have come to know through his writing."

The Wall Street Journal

Leonard Barkan’s Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a triumphant vindication of critical self-absorption. This remarkable, exuberantly written book proves what many would scarcely think possible: that details unique to one individual (and a highly unusual one at that) can lead to fresh insights into some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, and at the same time that a sustained reflection on plays written four hundred years ago can lead to intimate and absorbing self-revelations.”

—Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Can we read Shakespeare without reading ourselves? Can we as critics write or teach Shakespeare without sensing that Shakespeare had pre-written versions of our own lives or that our intellectual and emotional itinerary wasn’t already traced in the plays and sonnets? We didn’t see this, we never do, which is why we need to ‘Barkanize’ our Shakespeare, because Shakespeare always matters. The humanity, candor, humility of this book is disarming and reminds us that nothing exalts us more than to hear our most personal difficulties echoed by the great Bard himself.”

—André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

“Reading Shakespeare Reading Me is a celebration of the act of reading; the way in which through literature one travels out of the self, into the other and discovers one’s own identity. It is literature, in this case Shakespeare, that reveals us to ourselves. Barkan brilliantly unpacks his love of Shakespeare through the narrative of his own life, illuminating how Shakespeare’s psychodramas offer a path to understanding the unanswerable questions of one’s own youth, ultimately realizing that the narrative of family life is but a fiction written and rewritten many times along the way.”

—A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven: A Novel

“This is a brave and ambitious book: smart, learned, funny, and insightful. Barkan has mastered a conversational style that belongs partly to the classroom, partly to the space of theaters and museums, and partly to a kind of urbane humor that belongs to his generation of New Yorkers. Barkan has achieved something real and new here, and I am confident that an abundance of readers will find new ways into Shakespeare and into life writing through the gift of this book.”

—Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare

“Leonard Barkan writes as one hopes a great teacher would teach—without cant, with modesty, and with genuine excitement about something that is worthy of our attention and maybe even our love.”

—William Germano, author of On Revision

Reading Shakespeare Reading Me by Leonard Barkan (Apr. 5, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8232-9919-5) recounts the many ways that Shakespeare’s works have influenced the author’s life, and how the plays have taught him about beauty, truth, death, and the power of performance.—Publishers Weekly, Spring Announcements

“This is the kind of book on Shakespeare that you can write when you are in your seventies and securely tenured. Barkan is relaxed, genial, confessional, but also dead serious, and willing to admit—indeed, this is the book’s subject—that we read Shakespeare to find out how to live, and why we go on living.”—Joan Acocella, staff writer, The New Yorker

From the Publisher

Mr. Barkan takes delight in. . . the four major plays to which he devotes his attention, each of which, he writes, "feels as though it belongs to me." Belongs to him because it helped to shape him. Mr. Barkan makes those plays belong to his readers as well. That's what the best kind of reading, criticism or aesthetic absorption should do.

Wall Street Journal

. . . [T]hose looking for a gay man’s account of coming of age (and aging) while pondering some of the most resonant moments in Shakespeare—as presented by a leading Renaissance scholar—will find much to love in Reading Shakespeare Reading Me.

Gay and Lesbian Review