"When I entered our room, he looked up from his book of wisdom and asked where I'd been. I replied that I'd just seen Hamlet. 'What's that?' he said, not a question you might anticipate from a class valedictorian in most schools. I explained that it was the story of a young guy whose uncle had murdered his father, prompting the guy to seek revenge. Also, the uncle had married the guy's mother... before the murder. 'Does the guy get killed in the end?' [he] asked."
--from "Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard" By Herman Gollob
On the eve of retiring from a successful publishing career, Herman Gollob attends a wonderful Broadway production of Hamlet starring Ralph Fiennes. Galvanized by the splendor of the language, the drama and the acting, he discovers an insatiable passion for all things Shakespeare. He reads broadly and deeply about the plays, discusses them with some of the great actors, directors, and teachers of our time, and soon finds himself teaching a popular Shakespeare class at a small New Jersey college. Gollob’s quest leads him to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon; to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; to a summer course on Shakespeare at Oxford; and to London’s recently rebuilt Globe Theatre. As he pursues his glorious new obsession, Gollob reflects on his family’s bittersweet history, his encounters with writers, and the emergence of a Jewish identity that inspires some original ideas about Shakespeare’s plays. Me and Shakespeare is a joyful memoir that attests to the power of literature to re-invigorate our lives at any age. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/69124/me-and-shakespeare/
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