Going back to the old blog to select a ‘From The Archives’ post can be intriguing.

One thing I’ve noticed this week is that, year-on-year, mid-September seems to be a time when I want to talk about books I’ve read. Sometimes they’re ‘just’ historical fiction, but often it’s the background ‘wider reading’ which helps inform my ideas.

If I were picking, say, twenty ‘Shakespeare books’ that anyone seriously interested in Shakespeare should read, Michael Bogdanov’s would be loud and proud on the shelf.

It’s a great antidote to the assumption that everything that can be said about Shakespeare has been said, and reduced to a single, usually lionising, interpretation. Bogdanov is practical, irreverent, and interested in what happens when Shakespeare gets made into theatre.

I’d like to count Bogdanov as one of my ‘tribe’.

He treats the plays as if they are alive, as if they were written yesterday. He’s boisterous, argumentative, and gloriously opinionated.

Remember during COVID, when everyone was newly judging the books on people’s shelves during Zoom meetings?

THIS is one of those you can judge me on.

[book review] Michael Bogdanov – Shakespeare: The Director’s Cut

Over to you: which books do you think every Literature student should read beyond their set texts, and why?