Me and Shakespeare

April 1, 2002
This is a thoroughly engaging account of one man's late-life passion and his attempts, mainly successful, at pitching it to others. At age 67, having retired after a long and distinguished career in publishing, Gollob surprised himself and everyone around him by parlaying his recently acquired fanaticism for the Bard into a position teaching Shakespeare at an elder hostel. The conversion experience had come when Gollob witnessed Ralph Fiennes's acclaimed 1995 Broadway performance in Hamlet. Gollob had already recovered his Jewish roots, having had a bar-mitzvah in middle age; combining his two passions, he began to make connections between the Torah and Shakespeare. After several terms as a popular instructor, Gollob decided he needed to go back to school and enrolled in a short course on Shakespeare at Oxford, where he was so taken with his studies that he quotes big sections of his term paper (a Judaic reading of King Lear) and notes that even though he far exceeds the 15-minute limit for oral reports, his teacher exclaims that she was too rapt by his presentation to interrupt. Gollob fails to distinguish the various voices in his overearnest dialogue, and he has the autodidact's habit of proclaiming as original discoveries that have been generally accepted by scholars for years. But his enthusiasm for his subject is infectious—describing a pub meal with fellow Oxford scholars following an eye-opening morning of research, he asks, "Was that the happiest moment of my life or what?"—and his boyish zeal comes across as a call to arms to all readers who've ever contemplated changing their lives. (Apr. 30)Forecast: The audience for this? Bardomaniacs (Gollob's word), anyone undergoing a mid- or late-life change, denizens of the book world, anyone who has been overtaken by a literary passion.