I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to the next in our series of conversations. We have with us today Paul Cantor

who have known for many years and I'm thrilled to have him as a guest. He's a professor of literature at the University of Virginia.

I took his course I think in the English

department as when I was a undergraduate and he was a young assistant professor at

Harvard many decades ago. At the time he had already done important work on

Shakespeare and he's continued that work for the next three four decades

So we're gonna talk about Shakespeare

Paul welcome

Thanks for having me here good to good to have you so how did you get interested in Shakespeare?

I guess I have one sort of interested in Shakespeare if you're an English professor,

but you're distinctively.

I was destined to study Shakespeare because my mother was born on April 23rd and that's Shakespeare's

birthday too and I really feel it is a really Shakespeare's birthday or is that one of

those legends well now you know it's based on the fact I think it was baptized on April 26th and they usually

waited three days to see if the kid would live and since he did die on April 23rd in

16 16 they kind of April 23rd is his accepted birthday and I really come from a literary family my mother had an

MA in English from Cornell she used to take me to Shakespeare plays. My grandfather had a

PhD in English. My brother was very interested in literature. So I grew up in

my father collected books. I grew up in a house with all sorts of Shakespeare books around and then I was

taken particularly to Stratford Connecticut which in those days had a wonderful

Shakespeare theater I remember particularly seeing

Morris Carnofsky playing King Lear, was so good we went to it twice.

...