Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present

This author is like an NFL quarterback, with Shakespeare as the ball. He gets a firm grip at the start of the play with a capsule biography of William of Stratford, and he runs around the opposition pretty well at first, nimbly and wittily dodging past Restoration distortion, Enlightenment inflation, Victorian hero worship, Oxfordian skepticism, and Modernist mythologization. Faced with the heavy Postmodern fullbacks of Deconstruction etc., he's just not up to it, though, and he soon grinds to a halt under a pigpile of academic steroids. In the process, the ball disappears. They should fire professors when they stop scoring-- just like NFL quarterbacks.