Category: All Stories

There’s a quality peculiarly magnificent to certain enthusiasts, particularly those whose enthusiasm tipped over into outright crankery, or what was perceived to be such. It depends, I suppose, on what it is has gripped the enthusiast’s imagination; a person’s overriding obsession with, say, the history of mirrors may induce a groan or a shake of the head in those utterly uninterested in the history of mirrors;  similarly, an obsession with Shakespeare will send to sleep persons not given to worrying about Shakespeare. And Shakespeare, of all writers, has worried the minds of many. In the words of scholar Ivor Brown, “Shakespeare stands alone in his spawning of cranks and bores as well as of erudite scholars and devotees of genius.”  To which one might add a note of gratitude on considering the former. Certainly the byways of Shakespeare-lore would be marginally the poorer without its tales of the grandiose and/or driven amateur.