While I love Shakespeare, I’m not always comfortable with the unquestioning adulation that he’s accorded in our culture. I don’t for a minute buy the argument that somehow he created modern consciousness (as Harold Bloom contends). Nor do I believe that every word he wrote is somehow sacred. So many people (mostly academics) spend so much time trying to get to the definitive Shakespeare text, yet it’s an impossible task and virtually a fool’s errand. In part because of the forms of transmission we have for his texts are so unreliable (whether it was people frantically copying them down during...