About
Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he taught in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his scholarly books in recent years are Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. Moving beyond the areas of his official scholarly interests are books about two favorite European cities. In 2006 Farrar, Straus published Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome, an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. Ten years later, under the imprint of the University of Chicago Press, he published Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion. In 2021, Princeton University Press published The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and the Culture of Europe from Rome to the Renaissance. His latest work to appear, published bt Fordham University Press, is Reading Shakespeare Reading Me, an exercise in literary criticism and in autobiography. Current projects include Museum of Ashes, an attempt to bring life back to some four hundred great master paintings that were destroyed in a fire in Berlin after the Second World War was over, and Summer Places, an account of the different life that he has lived in summers between 1947 and 1997.
Featured Work
Reading Shakespeare Reading Me
Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility.
Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life?
King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author’s experience as a son of a former flapper. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is interpreted through the author’s joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare’s plays come alive in new ways.
