You may wish to sign up with Mark Van Doren, the great professor of English who lived from 1894 to 1972. In 1938, he wrote Shakespeare, which can be had in an edition from NYRB. The foreword is by ...

Science purports to have solved the proverbial question of whether infinite monkeys clacking away at typewriters could recreate Shakespeare’s works. They haven’t.

Because Shakespeare seemed like the consummate English author, it seemed to me that if you were going through the trouble of ...