The prominent Shakespeare scholar, James Shapiro, came to the Folger Shakespeare Library for an engaging and reasonably  wide ranging conversation. Rather than read much from his new book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, he read very briefly and then opened it up to questions for the rest of the time.

Luckily, the questions were generally well thought out and the product of (presumably) people reasonably well read on Shakespeare.

But…

I didn’t need a wide ranging discussion. He’s just published a book (I’m reading it now) and I would have enjoyed hearing more about it and its subject (Shakespeare in post-Elizabethan, which is to say, Jacobean, England). More focus, next time, please.

But, hey! Kudos to Professor Shapiro for this op-ed he wrote, trashing attempts to ‘translate’ Shakespeare into contemporary English.