Shakespeare

By Mark Van Doren
Foreword by David Lehman

This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.

Reviews

Van Doren was one of the few men of his time not to be made anxious by my near-incoherent account of my own initiatory vision; on the contrary he used the old word 'light.' That gave me permission to believe my own senses.
— Allen Ginsberg

In Van Doren's classes literature was treated, not as history, not as sociology, not as economics, not as a series of case-histories in psychoanalysis but, mirabile dictu, simply as literature . . . I thought to myself, who is this excellent Van Doren who, being employed to teach literature, teaches just that? Who is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?
— Thomas Merton

If during my stay at Columbia I had met only Mark Van Doren and his work, it would have been worth the trouble.
— Delmore Schwartz

That book defies critical genre because he'll move from giving a close reading of a speech to summing up whole vast realms. Or he'll launch into some of that marvelously weird stuff he could sometimes do in class. I'll never forget his saying to me -- he said it in class and I bugged him about it afterwards -- that the reason Hamlet can't kill the king is that it will put an end to the play and it's all so interesting. It's too interesting to put an end to! Now what kind of remark is that? That's like Hazlitt. We could imagine Hazlitt, who was a brilliant critic, saying something like that. Not too many since.
— John Hollander

[Van Doren] talks about each of the plays with the freshness of one who is reading it for the first time, yet with the insight and sensitivity to nuance that come only from reading and rereading. . . . To me, one of Van Doren's major strengths is his ability to criticize in the narrow sense of that term: to do so frankly unflinchingly, without prejudice, but with no less love.
— David Lehman

Van Doren's Shakespeare got me through Harry Levin's [Harvard] course back in 1951. Whenever I read a Shakespeare play I reread what Van Doren said about it.
— John Updike

Professor Van Doren enlightens us, not because he has any special knowledge or private advantages, but because his love of Shakespeare has been greater than our own.
— W.H. Auden

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.