Reading Shakespeare Reading Me Hardback - 2022

A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life.

"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

"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."--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."--Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare

"Can we read Shakespeare without reading ourselves? 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."--Andr Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

"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

"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

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 to 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. 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.

Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about the written word, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare's plays come alive in new ways.

Leonard Barkan is Class of 1943 University Professor 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; Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion; Michelangelo: A Life on Paper; and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa.