Shakespeare is easily the most written about dramatist, so much so that one feels he might have taken fright, had he lived, to see his plays interpreted on so many levels—some of them well beyond his ken. And this has been the case mainly with his tragedies. Maybe the critics feel that the comedies, the histories and others are not profound enough to discourse on. Whatever the reason be, the tragedies have remained their favourites throughout the ages—right from Dr. Johnson who rewrote certain tragedies to give them a more judicious ending, to Jan Kott who tries to make Shakespeare our contemporary by reading Marxism in his plays.
April 1976, volume 1, No 2