Shakespeare, William

And in his 2009 book on the bard, “William Shakespeare,” William Baker writes that from 1603 to 1613 theater closures amounted to 78 total months on account of plague and infection.

But the initials match those of Iohannes Shakespeare, William’s father, who dealt in leather hides – “no doubt some of them for bookbinding”, Kells writes.

Played out on a purpose-built site the size of the golf course which was previously there, it sees around 1,000 volunteer performers and crew members gallop through two millennia in around 90 minutes, stopping off for set pieces involving William Shakespeare, William the Conqueror and Sir Winston Churchill.

I was watching a Korean TV crew setting up cameras on a tombstone to ask the inevitable question of a couple who had led the parade as “Master and Mistress Shakespeare, William and Anne Hathaway themselves”: “There are some people in Korea who like Shakespeare poems. And some people in Korea who like Shakespeare plays. But can you tell me, today, what is the point?”

In funky, hallucinatory paintings by the Chicago artist Philip Hanson, at James Cohan, lines by Shakespeare, William Blake and Emily Dickinson appear as if seen in the fever dreams of a dying literature professor.