Included here are essays by the editors of the new Bantam Classic Shakespeare editions discussing their favorite or least favorite plays, pet peeves, and why each believes Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare.

David Bevington
Phyllis Fay Horton Professor of Humanities
University of Chicago

I got hooked on Shakespeare by listening to good recordings of the plays. I especially remember one with Claire Bloom and Alan Badel reading Romeo and Juliet quite wonderfully. Also Richard Burton as Coriolanus, John Gielgud as Richard II, Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Othello, Stanley Holloway as Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream. These and other actors brought their parts to life in such a vital way that I learned, just from these sound recordings, how much Shakespeare is a genius of the theater. A genius with theatrical language.

I have trouble answering the question "What is my favorite play?" There are several. How can one choose between Hamlet and King Lear for example? or Macbeth and Othello? Twelfth Night and As You Like It are simply magnificent in their own ways; so are A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Romeo and Juliet is a personal favorite with me, mainly because it is so delightfully funny in the first acts (as I learned from that recording). For history plays, you can't beat Henry IV with Falstaff so much alive in it. And as for Antony and Cleopatra (to quote from the play itself): "Kneel down, kneel down and wonder."

There are certainly some plays I can do without, starting probably with Timon of Athens and Henry VI though there are great things in these plays. Pericles is something of a mess, not all of it by Shakespeare. Shakespeare had a big hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen, coauthored with John Fletcher, but if one doesn't get around to reading this play, one hasn't lost much. The Two Gentlemen of Verona may be his weakest comedy.

I am a great believer, like all the teachers of Shakespeare I know, in the idea that Shakespeare wrote his own plays. The idea that they are by the Earl of Oxford, or Marlowe, or someone else, never came up in Shakespeare's lifetime; to the contrary, he was famous in his own day, and to believe that his fellow Londoners were all deceived in honoring him as a great playwright is to indulge in a conspiratorial fantasy. Oxford died in 1604, long before the late plays were written. Marlowe died still earlier than that. And the theory feeds no other purpose than to ask whether a man who never got to Oxford or Cambridge could have been learned enough to write these great works. Well, those universities were fine places to study theology in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but courses in contemporary literature and history just were not being taught. We misjudge the nature of those universities at that time to suppose that one needed to be there to learn how to write. Much better to go to London, as Shakespeare did, and read a lot, and see plays, and become an astute observer of the human condition. The amazing thing is that ANYONE could have written such a body of incomparably great drama.

I've been incredibly lucky to be able to teach Shakespeare and to write about him and most of all to edit his works throughout my career as a teacher and scholar. He is the greatest. And I've been lucky to experience him as a man of the theater, and as one who can be successfully adapted to film. Performance is such a gift, such a way to absorb his greatness.

A colleague once said to me, "Isn't it great to be paid to teach Shakespeare?" I was on academic leave at the time, and so I answered in a feeble attempt at riposte: 'The only thing better than that would be to be paid NOT to teach Shakespeare.' But of course I knew what my friend meant. It is a privilege indeed, and one that never grows stale. I can and do teach Shakespeare in some form every year, and it's always surprising, always new. Some writers, even great ones, answer our questions, or try to; Shakespeare questions our answers. I'm grateful for that.

David Scott Kastan
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

I am a little embarrassed (he may be more) to say I got "hooked" on Shakespeare my first year in graduate school in David Bevington's class. I thought I was interested primarily in modern British poetry, but when I took a few classes I was so disappointed I thought not only of leaving Chicago but giving up graduate school altogether. On the bus to the airport after my first term, I found myself sitting next to someone from the program who told me about "Bevington." I signed up for his course the next term, loved it, and, as they say, the rest is history. Lots of years have passed since then, but I have always felt grateful that I hadn't opted for a taxi.

To have a professional life made up mainly of reading, teaching, and writing about Shakespeare seems to me an incredible gift; I suppose I don't like all the plays equally, but they do all give me pleasure as I struggle to see how they are put together—and that seems to me the phrase: there is something so satisfyingly architectural about them. I do have favorites among the less popular plays: I love All's Well and also King John and have seen great productions of both. The truth is, however unfashionable it might be to say so, that the characters are still what most engage me. A famous novelist once said she decided what she thought about people by imagining how they would have behaved to King Lear. That might not be my exact touchstone, but it does suggest how immediately we engage with the characters of the plays; they often seem to me, if not more real, certainly more interesting than many of the people I deal with each day (especially now that I am chairing the department).

I suppose, like most professional Shakespeareans, my "pet peeve" is the insistence by some that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. It is an argument born in snobbery—the assumption that someone not educated at court or at the university could write these remarkable plays; but in fact many of the great writers of the age came from similar backgrounds, and we know a tremendous amount about the man Shakespeare, including the fact that he did—or at least his contemporaries certainly thought he did—write plays. For the skeptics to be right would involve a conspiracy of remarkable proportion with nothing really to motivate it. In my most ungenerous moments I take solace that three of the "anti-Stratfordians," as those who deny Shakespeare's authorship are often called, were named Looney, Battey, and Silliman.