Why pleasurable? Well, ordinary narrative often takes these things for granted or makes you feel unsophisticated for wondering about who the narrator is and how much he or she knows. It’s just about the only biographical speculation about Shakespeare I have any patience for, and that includes Stephen Greenblatt’s elaborate but unfounded fantasy about the origin of Shylock, and James Shapiro’s baseless sophistry about how Shakespeare supposedly wanted to cut Hamlet’s last soliloquy. And thus at that moment when the Ghost cries out to Hamlet on the stage, Shakespeare was-since he’d lost a son named Hamnet (or Hamlet) when the boy was only 11- in some poignant, resonant way crying out to his lost boy from the realm of the living to that of the dead. It’s based on the apocryphal story that when Shakespeare was an actor at the Globe, he played Old Hamlet, the ghost of young Hamlet’s murdered father. All right, it’s true, in The Shakespeare Wars I pay tribute to Joyce’s quite tender and loving speculation about the emotional resonance of one putative episode in Shakespeare’s life. But you’ve also written fondly about the 30-page Hamlet discussion in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter.
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