About the Project

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 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 fifty years earlier.