Michael Alexander’s Reading Shakespeare

In the winter of 2018-2019, Michael Alexander, a medieval scholar who recently published the second edition of his Reading Shakespeare (Red Globe Press, 2019), contacted the newsletter to ask if we might consider interviewing  him in connection with this second edition. Alexander’s first critical book was a study of the poet Ezra Pound and he was already noted for his verse translations of The Earliest English Poems and of Beowulf, long available in Penguin Books, to which he has more recently added a best-selling History of English Literature, now in its third edition. His latest book, published in 2017, is an updated paperback of his Yale UP book of 2007, entitled Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. I recalled that, when the first edition of Reading Shakespeare was published in 2013, I had thought about trying to review it, and didn’t–so I contacted Professor Alexander to arrange an interview. The book attracted my attention six years ago because I wondered what someone without a background in Shakespeare scholarship might have to say about the playwright. Michael and his wife Mary were in New York for several weeks this spring, so we arranged to meet at his daughter’s flat in Williamsburg.

Preparing for this meeting, I realized that I have read only one other book like this, years ago, when I was a graduate assistant for…