Shakespeare After All
In recent years, Garber, a professor at Harvard, has attracted notice with offbeat work about such subjects as dogs and cross-dressing, but this book—a collection of her lectures on each of Shakespeare's plays—marks a return to the core curriculum. Garber is appealingly undogmatic, deploying insights from textual scholarship, post-colonial theory, and Elizabethan stage history, without being beholden to any single approach. Although she has no blockbuster Bard thesis to prove, her introduction is an exemplary account of what is known about Shakespeare and how his work has been read and regarded through the centuries, while the individual essays display scrupulous and subtle close reading. It is well known that Romeo and Juliet's first lines to each other form a sonnet, but Garber adds that it reverses the Petrarchan tradition of unrequited love: it is "a sonnet that works. It results in a kiss."Copyright © 2005The New Yorker