Conversations on Shakespeare

In the spring of 2020 two old friends from graduate school, on opposite sides of the country, began email conversations about Shakespeare.

Dustin Griffin, living in Williamstown, Massachusetts and Michael O'Connell in Santa Barbara, California, both retired professors who had taught Shakespeare until their retirement a decade earlier, decided they would reread Shakespeare and discuss the plays, act by act, in an immediate and fresh way.

Many of the plays were very familiar to them from their teaching and research, but other plays they had not read for years, in some cases since their own time in undergraduate and graduate school more than fifty years earlier.

By the time they had finished they found they had produced almost three hundred pages of text. They propose now to release their discussions on this website, with a space for other readers to respond both to them and to Shakespeare.

The Works

38 conversations

histories 1 Henry VI histories 2 Henry VI histories 3 Henry VI comedies A Midsummer Night's Dream comedies All's Well That Ends Well tragedies Antony and Cleopatra comedies As You Like It tragedies Coriolanus romances Cymbeline tragedies Hamlet histories Henry IV, Part 1 histories Henry IV, Part 2 histories Henry V histories Henry VIII tragedies Julius Caesar histories King John tragedies King Lear comedies Love's Labour's Lost tragedies Macbeth comedies Measure for Measure comedies Merchant of Venice comedies Much Ado About Nothing tragedies Othello romances Pericles histories Richard II histories Richard III tragedies Romeo and Juliet comedies The Comedy of Errors comedies The Merry Wives of Windsor comedies The Taming of the Shrew romances The Tempest romances The Two Noble Kinsmen romances The Winter's Tale tragedies Timon of Athens tragedies Titus Andronicus comedies Troilus and Cressida comedies Twelfth Night comedies Two Gentlemen of Verona