Bookshelf

Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.

Shakespeare and Baseball: Reflections of a Shakespeare Professor and Detroit Tigers Fan by Samuel Crowl ’62.

April 19, 2024

Tags Alumni Book

(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Special Publications, 2024).

The author, trustee professor of English emeritus at Ohio University, explores his life as a champion of the Bard and a fan of the Detroit Tigers. According to the publisher, “He saw his first Tigers game in the summer of 1950 (Hal Newhouser beat the Chicago White Sox) and his first Shakespeare play in 1953 (Alec Guinness as Richard III at Ontario’s Stratford Festival) and has spent almost 75 years enjoying and writing about the pleasures of play that each provides.

“… Crowl finds unexpected connections between his twin subjects, including beer, which funded and fueled both the establishment of Major League Baseball clubs, like the Yankees and Cardinals, and the creation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A deeper linkage is that Shakespeare’s festive comedies kept the ideas, rituals, and customs of rural England alive in the dense urban world of Elizabethan London, just as baseball kept the image of the garden — the rural American past in which the game took shape — alive in the 20th-century American city. The book is written in a style that captures what one reader has called Crowl’s ‘warm, rich Midwestern voice’ and will be of interest to fans of the game and of the Bard, from high schoolers on up.”