Serial Killers and English Professors

It’s just a turn of phrase like any other and anyone in an English classroom has used it. “Oh, the themes in Shakespeare are…”. And yet, this everyday phrase is eminently bizarre. When was the last time you hung out inside Geoffrey Chaucer? The only way to get inside someone is the old fashioned way: really point knives and an affinty for blood. Silence of the Author: The Re-Rising Yet Again of Hannibal Lecter.

And to take it one step further, the only authors who one would get 'in' have to have a 'body' of work. Dirty!

Of course this turn of phrase has little to do with the author themselves. You really don't want to get into Chaucer. The man was a known player and lord only knows what diseases he was carrying.

Ok, ok, seriously now. Getting 'into' an author is an issue I've always had, especially when they have a huge body (hehehe still dirty) of work. Having taken several intensive author-centric classes in college, I was always surprised about how all an author's works get lumped together. Let's go with Shakespeare since I'm sure all two of the people reading this are familiar with his work.

It's hard to be sure when Willy wrote which play, but let's take chronology out of the picture. This is a man who wrote Romeo and Juliet (which I loathe as much as the Titantic) and Richard the Third. How do you study those two plays together and approach anything like an understanding? What common themes are you supposed to draw and what kinds of conclusions are you supposed to make about the Willy himself? Considering that some of his interests probably lay in men and for his own financial security he had to write plays that favored the current crowned head, there's nothing certain that one can draw from his plays about him as a whole.

Went all serious at the end there, didn't it?

Catch you on the flipside,
Chic Geek Librarian