July 1, 1985
Identity Dis-Figured: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream1 has been much better served by the critics than any of Shakespeare’s other early comedies, so I want to acknowledge the indebtedness of my own sense […]
July 1, 1985
Parallel Practices, or the Un-Necessary Difference
Nearly fifteen years ago, at the interval of a performance of Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I overheard a spectator (who happened to be a scholar-critic) say, “Of course, […]
July 1, 1985
The Half-Life of Tate in “King Lear”
Most of us think of Tate’s King Lear as an aberration of a foolish age that would have been equally pleased with the happy ending of Oedipus described in Never […]
July 1, 1985
Shakespeare Closing
By 1970, a remarkable change had come over theater audiences in New York. For the first time in the experience of regular playgoers, audiences became extraordinarily demonstrative. I recall precisely […]
July 1, 1985
Introduction: 1985 Ohio Shakespeare Conference
Teachers of Shakespeare have long been divided into two factions: those who teach the plays as literature and those who teach them as drama. The aim of the 1985 Ohio […]
July 1, 1985
Rereading “Othello”, II, 1
Despite Heminges’s and Condell’s good advice at the beginning of the First Folio—”Reade him therefore; and againe, and againe: and if then you do not like him, surely you are […]
January 1, 1960
Landscape: The Eastern Shore
[This is the first in a series of occasional pieces called Landscapes. Their purpose is not to give a journalistic picture of a place, but to draw, by imaginative means, […]