I, Shakespeare

For those of you who are looking for a companion text to Shakespeare’s works but don’t want something that either

• reads like Alan Greenspan wrote it when he was feeling particularly long-winded and verbose, or
• insults your intelligence by starting off with a sentence like, “Shakespeare lived a long time ago, before television”

then I would suggest looking to the last person you’d ever think to look to: Isaac Asimov. He wrote a guide to Shakespeare that gives a play-by-play analysis (har, har) of all Will’s works. Each section, devoted to a single work, is only 10-20 pages long and written very much for someone with a solid education and an appreciation for humanities, language, classics, and history who is simply looking to get a fresh perspective on one of Shakespeare’s plays. Best of all, just when you’re getting sick of reading… the section ends. Perfect. Now you can go play Halo.