Foreword: What Is Shakespeare? Who Is He? And When Is Shakespeare Himself Again?

Tom Clayton took his doctorate at Oxford in 1960, his dissertation was published as the Oxford English Text of The Non-Dramatic Works of Sir John Suckling (1971). Beginning in 1960, he taught at Yale and UCLA before returning to his native state and the University of Minnesota, from which he formally retired as a Regents Professor Emeritus in 2015. He published on Hamlet first in 1967 and last in 2018, between-times (1992) editing a collection of essays on The ‘Hamlet’ First Published: Q1, 1603 (introd. ‘Hamlet’s Ghost’). He has published essays on seven of Shakespeare’s tragedies including the major Roman plays, and on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, among others. He remains devoted to Shakespeare’s plays as literary scripts for enlightenment, reading, performance, translation, and adaptation; and in particular to the playwright’s designs, partly as conveyed by the means of meter’s making meaning (semetrics).