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Reading Shakespeare Reading Me
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.
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.
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published April 5, 2022
About the author
Leonard Barkan
21 books6 followersLeonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) 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. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine.
He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye
He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 30, 2022
To appreciate this book, it is vital that you like or at least have a history with Shakespeare’s work. I was unaware of this before diving in, so my opinions are slightly skewed. This is non-fiction, so there is not much of an imaginative story, and Barken primarily describes Shakespeare's stories. However, I did enjoy the sections where he detailed his own life. I felt these elements were more entertaining and digestible than the Shakespeare analysis. I want to note that I understand the book's point is to show the author's life in relation to Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps it was the analytical approach that made a large portion of the book a bit dull. Maybe a more creative perspective could have changed the tone of the analysis. Again, this is coming from someone with little Shakespeare background. The plot aside, the writing is terrific and descriptive. I was able to “hear” Barkan’s voice making the connection between him and the reader stronger. The way he structures the evolution of his life events is also well developed. It’s not necessarily linear, but that adds depth as you slowly learn more about him as a person/ his past. The intellect level is geared to a more knowledgeable audience as well. This is an excellent book for Shakespeare and literature lovers. I recommend it, just maybe not for myself!
August 6, 2025
Barkan is in control here. He takes you to some illuminating places. The Prologue chapter is one of the best things I’ve read this year. And some clever stingers, too, especially at the very end.
Also he’s hilarious at times.
“Or at the very least, I am in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to me, to my life, to my sensibility, to my experience.”
“Perhaps the family romance is the originating impulse of all fictions.”
“Sometimes when one takes notice of a lack in previous scholarship — the proverbial ‘much-needed gap’ — it is the perfect inspiration for one’s own work, which is then projected as a remedy for that lack. At other times, such as this one at my desk in the British Museum, the lack appears so vast, so structural, so constitutive, that the wish to propel oneself suicidally into the void simply fizzles.”
“Lust is bad, making children is good — and coming up with rules that subdivide anything as uncontainable as sexual desire is bound to produce even more torment.”
“Let’s go back to Aristotle and his preference for probable impossibilities as over against impossible probabilities. What I think he means is that it is preferable in creating fictions to invent something that couldn’t happen in life as we know it yet make it seem credible, as opposed to dealing in ordinary events and to transform them — say, via the mechanisms of plot — into something unlikely. The poet engages in a higher order of creativity when the ultimate premise is unbelievable yet the manner of its presentation is so compelling that we simultaneously embrace two opposites.”
“A confession, or maybe an apology: I’m always a little uncomfortable when I arrive at the point of my literary interpretation where I am, explicitly or implicitly, saying that the work itself is about language. Clearly, the work is in language, language is its essential instrument; how could it not be ‘about’ language? How much analytic mileage, therefore, can I claim by making such a point? Is the Sistine Chapel about brushstrokes or brushes or wet plaster or paint?”
“This is a universe in which eros is polymorphous, binaries have ceased to structure its operations, and celebrating individuals in poetry functions as some sort of equivalent to having sex with them.”
“I did what any self-respecting child would do: I ran howling into my bedroom and slammed the door.”
“Performance…is all about the lie that is made to appear as truth.”
“The only answer when you’re asked for infinity is to respond with zero.”
Also he’s hilarious at times.
“Or at the very least, I am in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to me, to my life, to my sensibility, to my experience.”
“Perhaps the family romance is the originating impulse of all fictions.”
“Sometimes when one takes notice of a lack in previous scholarship — the proverbial ‘much-needed gap’ — it is the perfect inspiration for one’s own work, which is then projected as a remedy for that lack. At other times, such as this one at my desk in the British Museum, the lack appears so vast, so structural, so constitutive, that the wish to propel oneself suicidally into the void simply fizzles.”
“Lust is bad, making children is good — and coming up with rules that subdivide anything as uncontainable as sexual desire is bound to produce even more torment.”
“Let’s go back to Aristotle and his preference for probable impossibilities as over against impossible probabilities. What I think he means is that it is preferable in creating fictions to invent something that couldn’t happen in life as we know it yet make it seem credible, as opposed to dealing in ordinary events and to transform them — say, via the mechanisms of plot — into something unlikely. The poet engages in a higher order of creativity when the ultimate premise is unbelievable yet the manner of its presentation is so compelling that we simultaneously embrace two opposites.”
“A confession, or maybe an apology: I’m always a little uncomfortable when I arrive at the point of my literary interpretation where I am, explicitly or implicitly, saying that the work itself is about language. Clearly, the work is in language, language is its essential instrument; how could it not be ‘about’ language? How much analytic mileage, therefore, can I claim by making such a point? Is the Sistine Chapel about brushstrokes or brushes or wet plaster or paint?”
“This is a universe in which eros is polymorphous, binaries have ceased to structure its operations, and celebrating individuals in poetry functions as some sort of equivalent to having sex with them.”
“I did what any self-respecting child would do: I ran howling into my bedroom and slammed the door.”
“Performance…is all about the lie that is made to appear as truth.”
“The only answer when you’re asked for infinity is to respond with zero.”
February 27, 2025
As much a memoir as a book about Shakespeare ... rather hilarious at times, always interesting
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews