Lear deBessonet’s (JS ’02) praises sung in New Yorker article

Part of the reason that Shakespeare remains one of the handful of writers who engage generation after generation of readers has to do with the way he is taught, or, at least, was taught in the New York City public-school system of my youth. Back then, in the mid-seventies, students balanced their attempts to understand iambic pentameter with recitations from the text itself; you absorbed Shakespeare’s almost otherworldly skill at threading ideas and emotions through groups of syllables by saying the words aloud. If you opened yourself up to the world the Bard created, it could change who you were.

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