Free Will

Harold Rhenisch brings Shakespeare alive for us in this sparkling and inventive work fusing drama, poetry and consummate clowning. In these alternately satiric and elegiac poems, Rhenisch gives us the world as a tragi-comic theatre in a provocative vision of human intelligence and transformation. Along the way, Rhenisch teases truth, recasts Shakespeare's major tragedies so they focus on their women, and puts on and takes off masks, always with the goal of freeing Will Shakespeare and releasing the passion of the poetic and dramatic traditions from the cloak of habit. This is Rhenisch the trickster at his best, in poems that both renew the lyrical and satiric traditions, and move them into a new sense of myth and light-footed irony.