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WILLING TO CHOOSE: VOLITION & STORYTELLING IN SHAKESPEARE'S MAJOR PLAYS

WILLING TO CHOOSE: VOLITION & STORYTELLING IN SHAKESPEARE'S MAJOR PLAYS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9762114-4-0

Pub Date: Fall 2007

Pages: 220


By Robert Pack


Robert Brustein says of Pack's new book of close readings of Shakespeare's plays, Willing To Choose: Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare's Major Plays, that “the whole book is filled with insight and intuition.” This book is intended for the reader and theater-goer who loves Shakespeare's plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity: their recurrent themes, the richness of their metaphorical language, the characters' psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and to human freedom.


Pack, a distinguished poet with eighteen books to his credit, makes the assumption that the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare's patterns of imagery as well as to admire the overall structure of the plays. What especially interests Pack is how these plays cohere and how they can be read from different perspectives that nevertheless complement each other. Pack has not adopted any single critical approach, but has responded to each play's individual identity from various interpretative points of view. Ultimately, Pack finds everywhere in Shakespeare's incomparable plays—a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by the Bard's acute awareness of human frailty. Robert Pack's study of Shakespeare is a poignant and mature meditation on the world's greatest writer.

—Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human


    Willing to Choose struck me as something utterly fresh and compelling, a book about Shakespeare that ought to inspire a wide range of readers. Robert Pack, himself a poet, understands Shakespeare's art in ways that seem both comprehensible and satisfying. Pack shows again and again what art has added to nature itself, making it somehow bearable. The willful choice to examine, to face reality boldly, and to accept the balm of its beauty without resorting to fantasy, was the wise and noble choice that Shakespeare himself made. Readers will be grateful to Pack for making this plain, for adding so much to nature himself in this strong, sensible, and artful book.

    —Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost, A Life


    This promises to be a work not only of scrupulous scholarship but, more importantly, of poetic imagination that promises to be a genuine contribution to Shakespeare criticism. His chapters on The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream are particularly powerful, but the whole book is filled with insight and intuition, written in a style that makes it a delight to read, for academic and lay person alike. The fact that Pack is a poet himself gives him a particular entree into the mind of Shakespeare, and his philosophical and psychological reading enhances his literary approach immensely.

    —Robert Brustein, author of The Theater of Revolt


    Robert Pack received his B.A. degree from Dartmouth College in 1951 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1953. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, at Barnard College, and at Middlebury College, where he was given the Chair of Distinguished Faculty Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, a position which allowed him to teach wherever in the curriculum his interests took him. He taught literature and creative writing classes in the English Department and the Literary Studies Program and also in the Program in Environmental Studies, where his interests in psychoanalysis, Big Bang physics, and Darwinian evolution came into play. He served as the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from l973 to 1994 and taught at Middlebury College’s graduate school of English, The Bread Loaf School, for over three decades. For years Pack served the Woodrow Wilson Foundation by teaching in residence for a period of one to four weeks at various small liberal arts colleges throughout the country, most recently at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, in 2000, where he was awarded an Honorary degree in the spring of 2001.


    The author of twenty books of his own poetry, the most recent being Elk in Winter and Composing Voices, and five books of literary criticism, Robert Pack finds everywhere in Shakespeare’s incomparable plays a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by the Bard’s acute awareness of human frailty. Currently, Robert Pack teaches in the Honors College of the University of Montana.

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