Stephen Booth is a professor emeritus of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Marshall Scholar and studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He first attracted attention with his controversial 1969 essays On the Value of Hamlet and An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, in which he reread the works in a manner considerably different from contemporary Anglo-American readings. Frank Kermode praised the former essay in the New York Review of Books in 1970 as being worth several full books of Shakespeare studies. In 1977 he published an edition with "analytic commentary" of the sonnets, again attracting both controversy and praise within the academy for his precision and bold rereadings. In 1983 followed King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, probably his best-known work after the study of the sonnets. His most recent book is 1998's Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night'''.
Works
Among Booth's published works are:
The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles. Book Club of California. San Francisco, 1969.
"On the Value of Hamlet" in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia U P, 1969. 137-176.
An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven, 1969 .
"Syntax as Rhetoric in Richard II," Mosaic, 10:3, 87.
Shakespeare's Sonnets, Edited with Analytic Commentary. New Haven, 1977.
"Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare’s Plays," in Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension. Ed. Philip C. McGuire, David A. Samuelson.
"Exit Pursued by a Gentleman Born" in Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Prospective, ed. W.M. Aycock, pp. 51–66.
"Milton's 'How soon hath time': A Colossus in a Cherrystone," ELH, 49, 449-67.
King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, & Tragedy. New Haven, 1983.
"Poetic Richness: A Preliminary Audit" in Pacific Coast Philology, XIX, No.1-2, 68-78.
"The Shakespearean Actor as Kamikaze Pilot", Shakespeare Quarterly, 36, 553-70.
"Twelfth Night 1.1.: The Audience as Malvolio," in Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber. Ed. P. Erickson & C. Kahn, 149-167.
"The Best Othello I Ever Saw", Shakespeare Quarterly, 40, 332-36.
"Close Reading without Readings" in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald, pp. 42–55.
"The Coherences of 1 Henry IV and of Hamlet" in Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Hamlet and 1 Henry IV, ed. Peggy O'Brien, pp. 32–46.
"Twelfth Night and Othello: Those Extraordinary Twins" in Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello, ed. Peggy O'Brien, pp. 22–32.
"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and All Others," Shakespeare Quarterly, 41, 262-68. Reprinted in Teaching Literature: A Collection of Essays on Theory and Practice, ed. L.A. Jacobus.
Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night. Berkeley, 1998
"Shakespeare's Language and the Language of Shakespeare's Time", Shakespeare Survey 50, 1-17.
"A Long, Dull Poem by William Shakespeare", Shakespeare Studies, 25, 229-37.
"On the Aesthetics of Acting," in Shakespearean Illuminations, ed. Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond, pp. 255–66.
"The Physics of Hamlet’s ‘Rogue and Peasant Slave’ Speech" in A Certain Text: Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others, ed., Linda Anderson and Janis Lull, pp. 75–93.
