[ ‘Under construction’ preliminary draft. But as of May 2003 you may preview W.S. timeline]

He won’t fit in a book, scarcely in a library. There is now such a mass of Shakespeare material in my library that it's going to take the rest of my life (not an hyperbole). For most of the Shakespeare material, I'm going to have to send you off to a whole ’nother section of the site:

Main Shakespeare Section

At least there you can see a blow-up of his atrocious icon, famously reviled as a “monstrous hydrocephaly.” How this figure came to be installed as the cornerstone of our image of England’s greatest writer is a puzzle — perhaps a fitting puzzle given the troubled status of almost all knowledge about Shakespeare.

     Will’s impact on the English language, on western civilization, and even on human consciousness is firmly established through intense scholarly studies from diverse academic fields. Yet after four hundred years of research the single worst gaping hole in shakespearean knowledge is how did he do it? That is, what was Shakespeare’s makeup in mind and spirit — what was the unrivaled gift which enabled this supremely creative being to alter the course of civilizations? An attempt to answer this question has pressed me onward in Shakespeare studies since the early 1990s. Feeling very timid about offering you my greenhorn efforts to scale this Everest of human destiny, I am also cautiously excited that perhaps I can entice a few to enjoy the majestic views attainable on even the initial slopes of this pinnacle.