The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups is a 2006 book by Ron Rosenbaum

Ron Rosenbaum

-Life and career:Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course...

, a one-time graduate student in the English department at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, New Haven, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

.

Rosenbaum's account of the genesis of this book is that it arose out of his need to cure the depression into which he fell in the wake of the research and writing he did for Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil is a 1998 book by journalist Ron Rosenbaum which tells of Rosenbaum's struggles with the "exceptionalist" character of Adolf Hitler's personality and impact on the world or, worse from his point of view, his struggle with the possibility...

. That book related his search among contemporary historians for an adequate explanation for Hitler's evil—and the underlying tension between "exceptionalist" explanations (Hitler was off the grid of 'normal' human behavior) versus naturalist explanations (Hitler was at the end of, but within, a continuum of human behaviors).

The work left Rosenbaum so drained and gloomy that the only antidote he could find was "to start walking around the city [New York] listening to Shakespeare tapes on a Walkman."

When the cure became his next big project, he adopted a parallel approach, focusing on the tension between exceptionalist and naturalist accounts of Shakespeare's creativity.

His own inclination is, in the matter of Shakespeare, exceptionalist. One has to invoke, he writes, "the boundary between physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 and metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

in trying the characterize this strange experience of deepening into bottomlessness" with each new reading or performance.