Professor Marjorie Garber boasts a list of credentials capable of bringing a grown person to tears. Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Chair of the Committee on Dramatic Arts, and perhaps one of the most intimidating individuals in the academic sphere. But a comelier tendency for wit, concomitant with her sunny sense of humour, is what rendered Marjorie Garber’s lecture on Desperately Seeking Shakespeare beguiling. Discussing the claim that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere is the real author behind Shakespeare’s plays, the professor punned ‘The Oxford Shakespeare editor Stanley Wells would be the editor of The Oxford Oxford’. Garber read a passage from the biography of Seabiscuit to advance the notion that the thoughts of a 20^th Century racehorse are no more theoretical than those of a 16^th Century person. The thoughtful product of Garbers’ demonstrative, invested mind, was a lecture savoured by both person and crowd. The audience actively welcomed the utterer and her sensitive, yet assertive enquiries on ‘who is Shakespeare? How can we find him? Where?’

The one-hour session opened with a thought on the ‘age of biographical insatiability’ scholars and popular culture are currently divested in. As argued by Garber: part of this enthrallment originates from the hope that one might catch the author planted in a character, a plot, in dialogue. However, this method often but reveals the time and the pundit behind that effort: ‘Like a portrait(…) the plays and their characters seem always to be modern, ‘always to be ‘us’’ (Quotation Marks, 1999). Professor Garber studies from a different incline, with questions that don’t regard readership but ‘why these plays have such a powerful hold on our individual and communal imaginations’. Analyses were backed with myriads of accessible paradigms, like Taylor Swift’s Love Story, and personalities such as Donald Trump. Some arguments recognizable from previous works like Profiling Shakespeare (2008), and others novel, opened up the floor to fresh discussions. The binding message was clear: literature, congruently with this Shakespeare person everyone is always talking about, is not a problem to be solved, but a world of its own to be explored and understood.

The dons’ sensitivity to the rhythms and vibrancy of Shakespeare eased the willing crowd into more complicated realms of literary inquisition, and acute interest, it didn’t know it possessed. This is perhaps the greatest complement to Garbers’ years as seminar-leader and lecturer at Yale, Haverford, and Harvard University. Attendants left with exhumed thoughts of their own, fruits of the unflinching reflections transferred to them. The closing proposition, ‘Shakespeare, your Shakespeare, the Shakespeare thought to be missing in action, has been here all along(…) on your bookshelves(…) in his poems(…)’, still holds an indulgent evocative power on me, carrying the alacrity Marjorie Garber sparked. The Professor loves the manner in which every word in Shakespeare ‘opens up to meaning’, and I commend much the same to her; it is possible that one found Shakespeare in her dialog.