The Great William

The Great William is the first book-length study to examine how writers wrestled with Shakespeare on the very pages from which they read, at the time they were reading. Theodore Leinwand reveals the remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters unnoticed in familiar Shakespeare influence studies. Each of the writers discussed here read Shakespeare over the course of decades, and each of them focused on surprising and intensely felt aspects of Shakespeare's poetic practice. Marginalia, reading notes, lectures, and journals show us, for example, how Keats arrived at his famous diagnosis of Shakespearean "negative capability"; why Virginia Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby; what Allen Ginsberg meant by the "mouth feel" of Shakespeare's verse; and how Ted Hughes stumbled onto the "dark matter" that provided him with what he called "the skeleton key" to all of the Shakespeare's plays. Leinwand shows that Shakespeare did something to these writers well in excess of his influence on their writing. He thereby speaks to the connection any reader of Shakespeare may feel with Coleridge, Keats, Woolf, Olson, Berryman, Ginsberg, or Hughes. We know as well as Keats that Shakespeare "overwhelms" us. Like him, our awe competes with our pleasure in reading The Great William.