Book Launch: "Shakespeare Unlearned"

Content

Book launch of Shakespeare Unlearned. Including conversation with author Adam Zucker, Associate Professor of English, UMass Amherst, and Joseph Gamble, Associate Professor of English, University of Toledo.

Shakespeare Unlearned discusses sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. The book pursues a study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. It suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends.