Saturday, October 11, 2014

Stephen Booth, Shakespeare scholar

Stephen Booth (born April 20, 1933) is a professor emeritus of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Marshall Scholar and studied at the University of Cambridge. He first attracted attention with his controversial 1969 essays On the Value of Hamlet and An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, in which he reread the works in a manner considerably different from contemporary Anglo-American readings. Frank Kermode praised the former essay in the New York Review of Books in 1970 as being worth several full books of Shakespeare studies.

In 1977 he published an edition with "analytic commentary" of the sonnets, again attracting both controversy and praise within the academy for his precision and bold rereadings. In 1983 followed King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, probably his best-known work after the study of the sonnets. His most recent book is 1998's Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night.


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Amazon.com offers Booth’s book, Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night, with these comments:

Book Overview

Why do we value literature so? Many would say for the experience it brings us. But what is it about that experience that makes us treasure certain writings above others? Stephen Booth suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. He uses three disparate texts—the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night—to demonstrate how poetics triumphs over logic in the invigorating mental activity that enriches our experience of reading. Booth presents his case in a book that is crisply playful while at the same time thoroughly analytical. He demonstrates the lapses in logic and the irrational connections in examples of very different types of literature, showing how they come close to incoherence yet maintain for the reader a reliable order and purpose. Ultimately, Booth argues, literature gives us the capacity to cope effortlessly with, and even to transcend, the complicated and demanding mental experiences it generates for us.

This book is in part a witty critique of the trends—old and new—of literary criticism, written by an accomplished and gifted scholar. But it is also a testimony to the power of the process of reading itself. Precious Nonsense is certain to bring pleasure to anyone interested in language and its beguiling possibilities.

Editorial Review

"Booth highlights the linguistic complications, illogical assertions, and incongruous imagery that distinguish, but enrich, disparate texts: the Gettysburg Address, poetic epitaphs by Ben Jonson on his children, and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night. . . . [Booth] argues that the illogic, irrationality, and incongruity (or "nonsense") in literature, which the mind tends to elide into superficial understanding, are really the most meaningful cruxes of the text."  --Choice

Customer Review

By Norman Rabkin

Honesty requires a disclaimer. Booth is a friend and colleague. But I would react similarly if I didn't know the author. If there were six stars, I would award them to Precious Nonsense. Booth takes familiar texts that seem all too clear and obvious and makes us see a multitude of things going on beneath their surfaces. His discoveries are startling and sometimes you want to argue with him, but because he puts his cards on the table he makes argument possible. What he shows demonstrates the difference between great prose and verse and ordinary writing, and reveals the similarity between the operation of literary art and that of music. Booth is phenomenally sensitive and deeply learned, and he has a terrific memory. A bonus is his style: he , in making us see how much goes on in such art that we are never as clear, conversational, and often funny.  This is a revolutionary book.

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Footnote by the Blog Author

There’s a brilliant, fascinating article about Booth and Shakespeare at:

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