Robert Watson

Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA, where he won the university's top teaching prize. For years, hundreds of students packed Harvard's biggest classrooms for his Shakespeare lectures. He's been a Fellow for terms at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Head Scholar for the National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Shakespeare Institutes, and a commentator on NPR and the BBC.His poems have appeared in the New Yorker and dozens of other literary magazines, and in his collections "The Museum of Craven Life" and "The Complete Wrecks." He's the author of prize-winning books on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, including the fear of death ("The Rest is Silence"), "Cultural Evolution and its Discontents," and Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" movie adaptation of Macbeth. His new book is "Shakespeare's Tragedies: What Makes Them Great," written to inspire a broad intellectual audience with lively and accessible insights on "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," and "Macbeth." His non-literary loves include his family, our dogs, and playing pickup soccer.