About

Publishing Perspectives is proud to launch “The Play’s The Thing,” a one year, roughly chronological exploration of the plays of William Shakespeare. Dennis Abrams will once again lead the group as we explore his work from every angle possible: the plays themselves, the development of character (or what Harold Bloom would call “the invention of the human,” the ways that the plays have been interpreted (and misinterpreted) through the years, and the production history of each play, both on stage and on film.

Most of all, we’ll be tracing Shakespeare’s own development as a playwright, as we witness the playwright of the early comedies and histories become William Shakespeare, the man who, in just one fourteen month period wrote three of literature’s most towering works: King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. How is that even possible?

Harold Bloom elaborated on this question. “How could the same dramatist have written ‘As You Like It’ and ‘Othello’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘King Lear’, ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Macbeth?’ Yet even that is less enigmatic than wondering, how could anyone have composed ‘Hamlet?’”

I hope you’ll join us as we set out to find out. Subscribe to our RSS feed, or click on the right to subscribe via email.

Dennis Abrams’ previous online reading projects with Publishing Perspectives include:

• The Cork-Lined Room: a year-long exploration of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• Project D: reading Dostoyevsky’s last four novels: The Idiot, The Demons, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov