I am a medical doctor, now retired after lifelong work in Emergency Medical Services. Following my interest in emergency response, I have also acquired degrees in disaster medicine and disaster management (the latter one an MSc and hence also very much focusing on how to perform good quality research). But I have no academic background whatsoever in English literature or in any other subspecialty of the humanities which may concern themselves with the study of Shakespeare.
Likewise, I am interested in history, but no trained historian – and therefore restricted to secondary sources. Even worse, I am not even a native speaker of English.
Yes, I am a dilletante. So, how do I dare to write a book about Shakespeare? Not easily, believe me. The ‘cataracts of ink spilled’ by Shakespeare scholars1 and the mind-boggling number of ‘four thousand new works – books, monographs, other studies – every year’2 are scary, so it took some time for me to gather my courage. But then I decided to view this topic the other way around and to regard it as licence to give it a try myself.
My interest in Shakespeare dates back to school days. My experience in school was rather a mixed bag, as my English teachers were not able to convey the fascination of Hamlet when we read it in class. But at the same age I fell in love with Franco Zeffirelli’s movie adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew (1967) starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, and also with Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968).
Not being a native speaker, I always liked to go back to the text after seeing a play. Can you imagine my despair when I tried to compare the German language Hollywood synchronisation with the standard German language Shakespeare edition available in the household of my parents, containing the age-honoured translations by Schlegel, Tieck and Baudissin?
Some twenty years later, when I finally had achieved some sufficient command of English, I started to collect English language productions and editions. My strong interest for the text prevails until today. And so, my book is written by a Shakespeare friend for other Shakespeare friends, who like to delve into the text of the plays. I know there are many of them out there – and some I had the pleasure to meet.
What I can promise you about my book is that I have tried to do my homework. The research took more than a year and went well beyond the level of effort that I put into my MSc dissertation. While I apply the scientific rules of quoting and referencing, my book does not intend to be a scientific publication;
but is important to me to differentiate the minority of my own ideas from the wealth of thoughts that I have found in other works. I hope the result will be a readable account of a personal quest – if my digging around in the wide field of Shakespeare and navigation-related literature justifies such a high-brow term.
I sincerely hope that of the two possible meanings of ‘dilletante’ – which are ‘doing it badly’ and ‘doing it for fun’ – it is rather the latter one that will apply to me in your judgement.
Shakespeare's Shipwrecks 