Literary Genius of Shakespeare
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on literature and language– most recently on Children’s Literature, Jewish culture, and the life of the theater. He has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Criticism. Among his many publications, he has written the books Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage.
Overview
Where would we be without Shakespeare? The romantic love of the "star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet, the Oedipal complex of the eternally indecisive Hamlet, the "vaulting ambition" (Shakespeare's phrase) of the tortured Macbeth… all of these characters and so many more are an integral part of our collective memories. Shakespeare's surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems embedded into the plays themselves. It is indeed impossible to imagine the English language and Western literature without Shakespeare, who many believe to be the greatest writer of all time. However we rank him, one thing is certain: when we read Shakespeare we encounter genius; an inventiveness and intellectual energy that will change our understanding of language – and literature – forever.