disassociation

[truepenny]

I adore Stephen Booth. Have I mentioned that? He's the editor of the best edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets to be had for love or money, he wrote an absolutely fucking amazingly brillant book called King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy, and he begins an article on Hamlet thusly:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Hamlet as we have it--usually in a conservative conflation of the second quarto and first folio texts--is not really Hamlet.

He is the only literary critic I have ever read who can make me laugh out loud (and that isn't literal only because I remembered at the last possible nanosecond that I was in a library).

I met him once and was fangirly, inarticulate, and failed utterly to catch his attention in any way whatsoever. *sigh*