《伟大的威廉》是第一本探索七位知名作家：Samuel Taylor Coleridge、John Keats、Virginia Woolf、Charles Olson、John Berryman、Allen Ginsberg与Ted Hughes，在阅读莎士比亚作品时，所遇到的挣扎。这些挣扎碰撞出无与伦比的智慧与情感繁星。
 
Theodore Leinwand透过这些作家的旁注、演说、信件、日记与阅读笔记，让我们清楚的了解到他们阅读莎士比亚作品时的感受与体会。我们会知道为何Woolf阅读莎士比亚与他的哥哥Thoby有关，也会知道Ginsberg所说的莎士比亚诗句的“口感”是什么意思。Hughes试图找出贯穿莎士比亚所有剧本的“万用钥匙”， Berryman耗尽千辛万苦编辑King Lear。Leinwand透过这些事，揭示了这七位作家在莎士比亚作品中所投入的经历与信念，也让我们看到他们的绝对自信与烦恼。
 
《伟大的威廉》书中写到的公开与私人回应，让我们看到这些作家阅读莎士比亚时，不为人知的一面，而这将我们与他们连结在一起。
 
好评
“Leinwand’s book is first-rate, a pleasure to read, and one of the smartest and most engaging studies to have crossed my desk in a very long time. It is also rich in archival discoveries, steeped in biographical insight, and deeply knowledgeable about the ways in which great writers have read and responded to Shakespeare. I learned a great deal from every chapter and can’t imagine a reader who wouldn’t.”
(James Shapiro, Columbia University)
 
“What an illuminating book! With great acuity, scrupulous research, and learned determination, Leinwand studies and describes how some of our most notable writers contend with Shakespeare, urgently probing his work, catalyzing their own. The Great William teaches us a great deal about Shakespeare, about seven master literary eccentrics, and about ourselves as readers.”
(Edward Hirsch, author of A Poet’s Glossary)
 
“Leinwand has written not a study of influence, as we’ve come to understand the word, but a study of the actual mechanisms of inspiration—an account of how the highest verbal artistry nurses the future of art, preventing nothing. What’s more, he has done so without reliance on any sentimental notion of what constitutes Shakespeare’s inimitable greatness. Meticulously researched, seductively narrated, The Great William is a book about (in Proust’s phrase) the ‘original psychological act of reading.’”
(James Longenbach, University of Rochester)
 
“The Great William—which at one point imagines Shakespeare as a gigantic walking ear taking in all the words of his world—shows us the strange, often wild life that the playwright’s own words lived in the ears and minds of seven uncommon readers. Leinwand catches beautifully the distinct colors of voice, and the distinctly Shakespearean touch, in each of his authors. One comes away from this probing, continually surprising study with a more urgent sense of how any of us engage with Shakespeare’s texts, conversing with them in the margins and in our memories.”
(Kenneth Gross, author of Shylock Is Shakespeare)
 
关于作者
Theodore Leinwand是Maryland大学的英语教授。他是The City Staged and Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England一书的作者，也是Shakespeare Quarterly 一书的顾问编辑。