The Shakespeare Project and Ensuing Essays

Book excerpt: For twenty-plus years on a small Midwestern campus, Dr Lewis has directed The Shakespeare Project, a seminar scrutinizing four-six plays per semester with a cadre of accompanying sonnets. Master a method of reading the Bard through focus on a small set vis-à-vis scattershot survey, his syllabi promise, and one not only could, but would want to read Shakespeare – “not for an age, but for all time” (Ben Jonson ) – all one’s life. The Bard’s idiom, though complex, proves eminently comprehensible, as have observed such scholars as Kermode, Vendler, Bloom, Garber, Greenblatt, Nuttall, Booth, Eliot, Auden, and others. This book, the harvest of Lewis’ endeavor, consists of three parts: the seminar essay-syllabi; a collection of close readings of Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry VIII, Timon, and The Sonnets; and a series of footnotes intended as mini-master essays on minutiae. The Project is grounded on the originary definition of scholarship as studying in school, and offers a revisionary reading of three “minor” characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Emilia, Albany, Siward), in the process of contending for a sensible coalescence of ‘old-fashioned’ character criticism with New Critical and Poststructural perspectives. The text also formulates criteria for responsible reading via triple vision – perceiving the work as at once reality, poem, and play – a method forwarded through addressing ethical matters in the works: faith in Hamlet; conscience in Henry VIII; stewardship in Timon of Athens. The Shakespeare Project models reinfusing Shakespeare as terrain for critical thinking that affects everyday life.