Shaw versus Shakes

by Kirk Woodward

[It’s a little less than a month since my friend and Rick On Theater’s most prolific contributor (my count: 112 posts of which he was author or co-author) has had a new post on the blog and he’s back with an intriguing and informative piece on arguably the two best-known playwrights in the English-speaking world: George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare.

[Taking as his title a parody of Shaw’s own Shakes versus Shav (1949), a 10-minute puppet play which comprises a comic argument between Shaw and Shakespeare, Kirk takes a more thoughtful tack, examining Shaw’s criticism of Shakespeare and comparing it with his own assessment of Shaw.  In Shakes versus Shav, the two puppet playwrights bicker about who’s the better writer as a form of intellectual equivalent of Punch and Judy, but in “Shaw versus Shakes,” Kirk is more restrained.  ROTters will know that my friend is an avid fan of GBS.]

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a great admirer of the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). He wrote that:

When I was twenty, I knew everybody in Shakespear, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries.

(Shaw, who had his own ideas about spelling, felt that “Shakespear” was the proper way to write the name, although in fact Shakespeare himself spelled it a number of different ways, spelling being fairly inconsistent in his time.)

Why then does Shaw write:

That Shakespear’s weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology. That his characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort. That there are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes in Shakespear. That his test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test and that since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test, Shakespear comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect to being fertile enough, instead of repeating Vanitas vanitatum at second hand to work the futile doctrine differently and better in such passages as Out, out brief candle.

Referenced in this quotation, John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a critic, particularly of painting, whom Shaw admired. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was a novelist; Vanity Fair (1847-8) was his first major success. "Vanitas vanitatum" is a Latin translation of the first words in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible – "Vanity of vanities." "Out, out, brief candle" is from Macbeth, Act V, scene v, Macbeth's soliloquy after learning of the death of his wife. 

Shaw’s statement strikes me as patently and demonstrably false in nearly every word. One wonders why anyone would bother with a writer like the Shakespeare that Shaw describes – a question worth tackling.

The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) provides a framework for evaluating Shaw’s position(s) on Shakespeare. Goethe says that criticism must ask the following questions: 

     1.      What is the artist trying to do?
2.      How well has the work been done?
3.      Is the work worth doing? 

(These questions are from Goethe’s “On Criticism” [1821-24] as translated from the German and edited by J. E. Spingarn in Goethe’s Literary Essays [multiple editions, incl. e-book]; originally published in Goethe’s journal Über Kunst und Alterthum [“On art and antiquity”] as a review of two pieces of writing.  Kirk also invoked them in his book The Art of Writing Reviews [Merry Press, 2009], and in two ROT posts: “An Experiment in Reviewing – Popular Songs,” 3 August 2012, and “An American In Paris (Part 2),” 13 November 2015.)

Shaw’s answers to these questions as they relate to Shakespeare’s work are all over the place. Before discussing them, however, I would like to apply them to Shaw’s own criticism of Shakespeare:

1.   What is Shaw trying to do in writing in such an inflammatory way? He is trying to get people to look at Shakespeare’s plays with fresh eyes. He is also trying to clear the way within the English stage for contemporary approaches to drama, particularly along the line of the plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). He sees Shakespeare’s plays and/or the way they are being produced as obstacles to the “new drama.” So he promotes Ibsen heavily as the “good” example, with Shakespeare as the “bad.”

2.   How well has Shaw done his work? He got results, both short and long term – although he did not manage to damage Shakespeare’s reputation. However, Ibsen’s influence quickly did begin to appear in significant plays like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), and unquestionably inspired playwrights for decades to come. More broadly the British theater began to get in touch with the issues of the day, a trend that continues to the present.

3.   Is Shaw’s focus on Shakespeare worthwhile? Unquestionably, both as far as productions of Shakespeare’s plays and of theater in general are concerned. His evaluations of the productions of his day are brilliant, and today’s Shakespearian productions are often among the most interesting of our time. (My favorite example is the director Peter Brook’s 1970 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so extraordinarily inventive and yet so faithful to Shakespeare’s play.) And Shaw deserves great credit for his part in “bringing the world into the drama.”

Hats off to Shaw, then, for doing work that needed to be done. To achieve it, though, he uses dubious means – dubious partly because much of what we have learned and now understand about Shakespeare’s work lay in the future, but much more because of his habitual traits of overstatement, redefinition, exaggeration, and sometimes deliberate misrepresentation.

But the primary fault in his presentation of Shakespeare’s plays is succinctly described by Edwin Wilson in his excellent introduction to the anthology Shaw on Shakespeare (1961):

 . . . for Shaw the “new drama” meant . . . only that the old ideas had to be replaced. Dramatic conventions were not the issue. This distinction is made clear in Shaw’s statement, “it is the philosophy, the outlook on life, that changes; not the craft of the playwright.” 

Herein lies one of the keys to Shaw’s Shakespearean criticism: by separating form and content so completely he was free to praise the one while criticizing the other; which is precisely what he did with Shakespeare. Shaw is forever juxtaposing manner and matter in his discussions of Shakespeare. [Italics mine]

In other words, if we use as a standard Goethe’s three principles of criticism, Shaw ignores his first principle by dismissing whatever intentions Shakespeare might have had in writing his plays, because Shaw does not find them appropriate. So he is not interested in the second question, how well Shakespeare did with the ideas he had, since they are not Shaw’s ideas.  

Instead, Shaw goes immediately to the third critical question, and denounces Shakespeare because what Shakespeare wanted to do was not what Shaw wanted him to do. Therefore, he values the plays of a playwright like Eugène Brieux (French; 1858-1932) above Shakespeare’s because he approves of Brieux’s literalistic presentations of social issues in his plays – and not in the way Shakespeare handles them.

Interestingly, though, Brieux’s plays are almost never performed today, while Shakespeare’s have never been more popular. To explain this situation accurately is to argue with Shaw, but also to point out some things Shaw either didn’t know, or discounted.

I want to tackle some of those things, moving from the less to the more consequential. Needless to say, books – sometimes shelves of books – have been written on each of the points I will make, and I am not going to try to prove all my statements. I simply want to lay out some of the possible grounds for disagreeing with Shaw.

In doing so I am drawing on the collection Shaw on Shakespeare mentioned above, and also on three books by James Shapiro (b. 1955): 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005); Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010); and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). Eric Bentley (1916-2020) writes extensively and brilliantly about Shakespeare. I also find Lectures on Shakespeare (2000) by the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973), edited by Arthur Kirsch (b. 1932), invaluable.

Again, we should keep in mind the considerable virtues of Shaw’s comments on Shakespeare. He insists on minimal and thoughtful cutting of the plays, on performing them as much as possible in the physical style for which they were written, on awareness of the musical qualities in the verse, and of the importance of intelligent and coherent acting choices. He was a pioneer in these and many other respects. (See Kirk’s post “The Producer and the Play,” a report on the book by and Norman Marshall which discusses similar issues in productions of Shakespeare, posted on 20 July 2023.)

And, as far as he could go with the scholarship available to him, he was aware of many of the points to be made here. As Edwin Wilson says, because Shaw divorces form and content, he can praise Shakespeare fulsomely as long as the form doesn’t conflict with Shaw’s political and social views.

So what we are discussing here is specifically a particular tone and attitude that Shaw adopts for purposes of his own in talking about Shakespeare, whose work in many ways he greatly respected. He can’t resist being insulting and patronizing to Shakespeare (whom he sometimes calls “our William”), leading him to say a great many things that to my mind are at best misleading and at worst are completely wrongheaded.

We should begin by pointing out that we can’t be certain that any of the plays of Shakespeare we have today are necessarily in the final shape he wanted them to be. (We also often can’t be certain of the dates of first performances of his plays either. I am using dates suggested by Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/histories-timeline/timeline.)

Playwrights in Shakespeare’s time did not own the plays they wrote – the theaters did (much as film and  TV scriptwriters today do not own their work), and eventually the theaters might sell the plays to publishers, who also would sometimes buy scripts assembled by actors who had appeared in them, and who recalled the words of the plays with varying accuracy.

The scholarly consensus is that Shakespeare cared about the publication of his non-dramatic poetry, but not about his plays – apparently a common attitude for the time. In fact, we have significantly conflicting versions of Henry IV, Part One (1596-97), Hamlet (1600), Troilus and Cressida (1601-02), and Othello (1604), a serious problem for editors of Shakespeare’s works.

Another fact of importance is the collaborative nature of much the playwriting of Shakespeare’s time (a situation that, again, is common today in film and television writing, where a whole team of authors may ultimately be responsible for a single script). A great deal of scholarly opinion estimates that others have contributed to almost a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays. (Shaw knew much of this.)

When we or Shaw say “Shakespeare’s plays,” then, we cannot be certain we are reading them in what Shakespeare considered their final version, nor, often, can we be certain that he was their only author. When Shaw says that Shakespeare was “careless” writing As You Like It, then, he might actually be criticizing a first draft, or a final version, or a script with interpolations by other writers in it.

Shaw complains that Shakespeare is frequently inconsistent in his characters. He makes this point about Iago in Othello, who at first seems to be a regular soldier and later becomes a sort of super-villain, and also about Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1595-96), who at one moment seems a boor and at another moment a poet.

It’s certainly possible that in either or both cases Shakespeare rethought the roles as he wrote – but, again, it could be that what we have is a problem of versions. After all, there are scenes in both Macbeth (1606) and Julius Caesar (1599) that logically are redundant and might have been – and perhaps were, along the way – cut.

But if we assume that Shakespeare intentionally left the inconsistencies in the plays, an ivory tower intellectual like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), or a dilettante like the 17^th Earl of Oxford (1560-1604 – both suggested as the “real” authors of Shakespeare’s plays), might find the variations problematic, but they would not faze an actor, like Shakespeare, because actors are used to performing characters in the moment.

Although an actor is aware that a play takes place over a span of time, the actor still attempts to act as if the play is taking place in real time, moment by moment. A person whose knowledge of the play was entirely literary would find this troubling; an actor would find it all in a day’s work.

In talking about Shakespeare’s style of writing (and sometimes giving the impression that Shakespeare has only one style), Shaw is patronizing, claiming that blank verse is actually easier to write than prose,

That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words, blank verse . . . is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression. . . . Also (this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan quality plus the Shakespearean quality. . . . What is more, that I have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage with huge applause.

Shaw’s statement is a good example of his rhetorical approach – he makes a statement that can’t possibly be proven and uses himself as a universal standard to justify it. Writing blank verse may or may not have been easy for Shaw; he certainly can’t know if it’s equally easy for me, or you.

And he exaggerates the success of his own efforts for comic effect; you would get the impression from his statement that he turned out blank verse plays by the dozen. Actually, he only wrote one full length play in blank verse (The Admirable Bashville, 1901), in order to secure a copyright claim, and it is hardly one of his masterpieces, although he enjoyed confusing people by claiming it was – let them prove him wrong!

Shaw’s blank verse has correct meter, but no claim at all to be poetry (and he doesn’t make one). Shaw acts as if Shakespeare’s poetry is merely a matter of putting pretty words on top of mundane situations. He writes

That Shakespear’s power lies in his enormous command of word music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes.

Shaw thinks of poetry as icing on a cake. But Shakespeare doesn’t add poetry to a situation; poetry is the situation, which doesn’t exist outside it, in the same way that there’s nothing “inside” a turtle’s shell – a turtle is its shell. (The same is true of Shakespeare’s prose, which Shaw also admires.)

Shaw jibes at Shakespeare’s being unable to come up with a story unless someone else told it to him first – which incidentally is not true of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-1601), or The Tempest (1611).

In saying this he ignores the fact that the playwrights of Shakespeare’s period were basically “rewrite men.” Theaters of the time needed an almost daily flow of new plays, so playwrights frequently took old stories and plays and refashioned them.

Shakespeare was a master, obviously, of the art of rewriting. His doing it was in no way shameful; it was his task, and in the period when he both acted and wrote, the pressures on him to “produce” must have been enormous, putting a premium on already-existing work. When Shaw hints that Shakespeare should have written other kinds of plays, presumably original ones, we need to remember what his job was.

And “Shakespeare” is not a monolithic series of plays, as Shaw often likes to assume they are. He knows, and sometimes admits, that Shakespeare had different purposes in different plays; but he ignores this fact or minimizes it.

For example, Shaw writes that in the so-called “problem comedies,” All’s Well That Ends Well (1603-6), Measure for Measure (1604), and Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare tried to “pursue a genuinely scientific method in studies of character and society.” He feels that these attempts failed; but surely it’s unfair to ignore his effort. (As Auden says, “Shakespeare is always prepared to risk failure.”)

Shaw’s use of the word “scientific” (one suspects he really means “Marxist” – Shaw loves to redefine words to suit his own purposes) gives his case away. If Shakespeare is not dealing with subjects Shaw is interested in, then he’s not “scientific,” and if he’s not scientific, then he’s “second rate.”

Shaw makes fun of Shakespeare for “profundities” like the observation that “good and evil are mixed in our natures.” Aside from pointing out that Shakespeare doesn’t say any such thing (he writes characters who speak for themselves), we can see that in the narrow sense, Shaw is quoting lines of Shakespeare’s plays that have become popular – in fact, cliches. (My father was not the only person to suggest that Shakespeare’s plays are only a bunch of famous sayings strung together.)

Shaw is not interested in issues that don’t fit in his “scientific” view of things. Shakespeare wrote in the context of Christianity, which Shaw rejects (unless he redefines it drastically); he did not write in the context of Karl Marx (1818-1883), who was born two hundred years after Shakespeare died, into a drastically different kind of economy.

Actually Shakespeare does tackle many issues in his plays, some of which would concern Shaw, some of which he would dismiss or ignore, some that were important in Shakespeare’s time but might be important to us in other ways today.

Shaw knows this, of course, but he rejects Shakespeare’s handling of his subjects because he feels that Shakespeare does not directly enough confront his society, demanding that it change. We might look at that demand a little more carefully.

For starters, one would think from his statements that Shaw’s plays are themselves full of demands for social change. One would be wrong – certainly his prefaces and articles contain instructions for renovating society, but few if any of his plays directly demand such change, and the same is true with Shakespeare.

As a matter of fact, Ibsen’s plays also for the most part do not fill Shaw’s demands of calls for change, and neither do Shaw’s. Both are dramatists, and both embody their meanings in the actions of characters. Certainly, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) demonstrates a possible change in the relationship between men and women, when Nora walks out on her marriage. It dramatizes the possibility – but it doesn’t preach about it.

The same is true of Shaw’s plays. There is an irony here, because Shaw was often accused, particularly concerning his early plays, of basically putting his platform speeches on stage, and he stated that he did just that. In fact, he almost never does. He lets his characters be more articulate than their real-life equivalents would be – and so, as a matter of fact, does Shakespeare.  

Looking at the subject from an Elizabethan/Jacobean perspective, how much freedom did Shakespeare have to attack the power structures of his time? The answer is that he had no freedom to do so directly. Every play had to be approved by a Royal official before it could be performed. Theaters had to be continually cautious about going against the prevailing political winds of the time. Mistakes could literally be fatal.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare found ways to present political and social problems of his time to his audiences. He began his career by writing plays often grouped as the “Histories,” chronicle plays about the rulers and wars of England. They and other of his plays dramatize the question: how should England be governed? Eric Bentley writes of the Histories in his book In Search of Theatre (1953):

The central idea imposes itself with beautiful clarity. In order to govern, a king needs two things: a past and a present, traditional authority and personal ability, hereditary right and kingly caliber. Richard II has the former without the latter, Bolingbroke the latter without the former, the right combination – or Hegelian synthesis – being found in Henry V. All three attempts at government are threatened with the failure that is non-government or civil war.

Shakespeare is dealing with fraught issues here. Succession was perhaps the leading political question of his time – who would succeed Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603) to the throne, and would her successor King James I be able to hang on to it?

Shakespeare had to tread carefully – James Shapiro describes in The Year of Lear the tightrope Shakespeare walked as he wrote Macbeth, a play about the succession to the throne of Scotland (ruled by James as James VI before he inherited the throne of England). Provocative stuff!

Shaw, writing in a completely different social and political climate, could openly rail against the established social order (particularly in his essays) – he made a career of doing so. Shakespeare could not. Shapiro shows how remarkable it is that he dared to do as much as he did.

As Shaw himself noted, plays that are entirely rooted in specific social issues ordinarily lose their fascination (if any) when those issues are resolved. Why then do we still care about and enjoy Shakespeare’s plays? The answer is that he has purposes even beyond the specific themes that he makes the subject of his plays.

And there are many such specifics. To give a few more examples, Shakespeare writes about the nature of justice (Measure for Measure), revolution (Julius Caesar), and the burgeoning mercantile society (The Merchant of Venice, 1596-97).

Although Shaw says that Shakespeare’s plays contain no heroes, many of his plays are about the nature of leadership, such as Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus (1608). Others center on literary subjects and styles – Love’s Labour Lost (1595-96), parodying the fulsome style of writing called Euphuistic, and The Comedy of Errors (1594), taking off from Roman drama. And many, of course, are about the nature of love, such as Romeo and Juliet (1595-96) and As You Like It (1599).

The fact is that, Shaw notwithstanding, no playwright is required to write about any particular subject – to hone in on one social theme, or on anything else. There are no rules. A play may be about anything the playwright wants. The only standard is how successfully it handles Goethe’s criteria presented above.

If a playwright wants to write about marriage (Getting Married, 1908), Protestantism (St. Joan, 1923), the American Revolutionary War (The Devil’s Disciple, 1897), language and class distinctions (Pygmalion, 1913), the battle of the sexes (Man and Superman, 1903), or theater critics (Fanny’s First Play, 1911) – as Shaw did on all these subjects – then have at it. (See Kirk’s five-part post “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016; The series covers all of Shaw’s plays, including the 1949 puppet play Shakes versus Shav, in the last installment.)

We are still left with the question, why do Shakespeare’s plays continue to fascinate us today? We have a clue in Hamlet’s words: the purpose of art is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” – to show us ourselves (that is, our “nature” – who we are) to ourselves. Shakespeare writes to expand our self-knowledge. (See also, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom [Riverhead Books, 1998].)

In this regard a distinction Auden makes is useful. He says (I am paraphrasing) that life faces us with two questions.

The first question is, “Do we exist?” Are we, in ourselves, anything more than a bunch of random reflexes? (Auden calls this a question of “essences.”)

The second question is, “If we do exist, what then are we?” (Auden calls this the “existential” question).

The first question refers to our inner self, the second to our selves as we interact with other selves.

Before we confront the first question, “Do we exist?” we are more or less in a state of unconsciousness. We don’t really know ourselves. In the beginning of Hamlet, things are happening to Hamlet and are affecting him, but he has no context for them because he has no real self-knowledge.

In the course of the play, however, through conflict, difficulty, and suffering (his own and that of other people), he comes to have an authentic sense of himself. He returns from England a different person, one with self-knowledge. Accompanying this awareness is an ability to understand others and accept or even forgive them.

This pattern can be seen as bedrock for Shakespeare’s plays – from unconsciousness, to consciousness, to forgiveness. Sometimes the cycle does not get far; sometimes it is complete. Some characters embody the pattern, some fail to, or we don’t see enough of them to know.

The point is that Shakespeare wants us, the audience, to make the same journey from unawareness to awareness and, he hopes, to acceptance and forgiveness. As we look in the “mirror” of his plays, what we see (he hopes) convinces us that we need to do the same thing – to recover our authentic selves and to be able to relate to the world and people in a new and understanding way.

We respond to this pattern in his plays at a subliminal level, which keeps them fresh when one would think they would be “dated” by now. His plays draw us to them (in a way that Shaw’s, wonderful though many of them are, do not) because they dramatize a basic arc of our existence, which Shakespeare “incarnates” in the plots and characters of his plays.

We respond to his “mirror” because it shows us a comprehendible view of a desirable progression in our lives. In other words, Shakespeare writes in order to change us – which should please Shaw – not in a specifically social context, but in the deeper sense of increasing our self-awareness.

We can now look again at some of the statements Shaw made that I quoted at the beginning of this article. He says

That Shakespear’s weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology.

On the basis of our discussion here, Shaw is mistaken. We have a right to ask if Shaw reaches the “highest level of thought” that Shakespeare does.

That his characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort. That there are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes in Shakespear.

This is nonsense from start to finish – religion, politics, conscience, hope, and convictions are present everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays – but the comment about “heroes” is particularly interesting. Shaw and Ruskin don’t know where to look for heroes in the plays.

Heroes in Shakespeare are characters who act with integrity. Examples are Beatrice and the friar in Much Ado about Nothing (1598), who refuse to believe Claudio’s lie about (it actually is her name) Hero. Often, of course, in our own lives we do not act with integrity. That is an important truth for us to know, and therefore Shakespeare dramatizes it often.

Shakespear comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect to being fertile enough, instead of repeating Vanitas vanitatum at second hand to work the futile doctrine differently and better in such passages as Out, out brief candle.

Shaw deliberately confuses Shakespeare’s meaning with the words that Shakespeare’s characters say – a confusion that a playwright, of all people, should not endorse, since Shaw knows perfectly well that his own characters are not simply his mouthpieces (although that accusation is often hurled against him).

The truth is that Shakespeare’s later plays all end where “Pardon’s the word to all” (Cymbeline, Act V, scene v). Auden says of Cymbeline (1610):

The final purpose of the play is that everyone must be related in love. . . . like a fairy-tale story, this is the world as you want it to be, and nothing makes one more inclined to cry.

There is nothing in drama less despairing than the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale (1611), with its “resurrection,” its marriages, and its springtime; or of The Tempest, in which a man, Prospero, has all his enemies in his power, and forgives them (to be followed by a marriage). As William Blake (1757-1827) writes:

Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of paradise. 

Auden even applies what I am saying to the powerful tragedy of King Lear (1605-6):

I do not agree that it is a nihilistic or pessimistic [play]. Certain states of being – reconciliation, forgiveness, devotion – are states of blessedness, and they exist while other people – conventionally successful people – are in states of misery and chaos.

I am not saying that Shakespeare believed all these things, because we can’t know what he believed or didn’t; but I am saying that they form an undercurrent in his plays that keep them vital to this day, as vital as anything that has been written, because they speak to a deep need in all of us, the need to understand who we really are.

[For readers who haven’t become familiar with Kirk’s contributions to ROT, he’s written many times already on both these classic dramatists.  In addition to “Re-Reading Shaw,” referenced above, Kirk’s contributed two more Shaw posts (“Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic,” 5 September 2012, and “Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015) and a whopping six on Shakespeare (“Frank Kermode on Shakespeare’s Language,” 26 January 2016; “Asimov’s Shakespeare,” 6 April 2016; “Writing As You Like It,” 5 September 2017; “On Directing Shakespeare,” 1 March 2019; “Shakespeare, Forgiveness, and Measure for Measure,” 20 July 2019; and “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare,” 17 November 2020).]