Shakespeare and Baseball

Samuel Crowl is trustee professor of English emeritus at Ohio University. During his long and diverse career, he received several honors for distinguished teaching, published six books on Shakespeare in performance on stage and screen, served for a decade as dean of University College, and was awarded an honorary degree at the university's two hundredth commencement in 2015. He still serves as a founding fellow of the Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities.

• ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part 1: The 1940s and the 1950s Shakespeare and Baseball I Shakespeare and Baseball II Part 2: The 1960s Shakespeare and Baseball III The 1968 World Series Part 3: The 1970s Shakespeare and Baseball IV Part 4: The 1980s The Perfect Game Shakespeare and Baseball V The 1984 World Series Shakespeare and Baseball VI Tiger Letter #1 Part 5: The 1990s Shakespeare and Baseball VII Tiger Letter #2 Shakespeare and Baseball VIII Tiger Letter #3 Part 6: The 2000s Shakespeare and Baseball IX The 2006 Playoffs and World Series Tiger Letter #4 Tiger Letter #5 Part 7: The 2010s Tiger Letter #6 The 2012 Playoffs and World Series Shakespeare and Baseball X Tiger Letter #7 Shakespeare and Baseball XI Notes

If baseball had been invented earlier, William Shakespeare would have been the greatest baseball writer of all time and Samuel Crowl would have become a professor of baseball. Crowl's memoir of his life's passions is a grand slam. - Tony Grossi, author and ESPN sports analyst Baseball and Shakespeare continually have a 'generational problem,' and what Samuel Crowl sets out to do is remind us of the parallel pleasures of both. Shakespeare and Baseball succeeds not only as a completely original work about our national sport and the plays of Shakespeare but also as an endearing story of a family's love affair with baseball and the Detroit Tigers. - Ralph Cohen, founding executive director of the American Shakespeare Center In Shakespeare and Baseball, Samuel Crowl regales the reader with the pleasures of play and the glories of the game from the ballpark to the playhouse. Reading this book is an almost kinetic experience, moving seamlessly between exquisitely detailed accounts of Detroit Tigers games, classic Shakespeare performances, travelogue, family history, and memoir. With an easygoing narrative voice, Crowl draws the reader into the story of a midwestern kid chasing baseball’s field of dreams to coming-of-age as a scholar and founder of a new academic field: the study of Shakespeare on film. Shakespeare and Baseball is a poignant, intellectually rewarding, and inspired chronicle of a life fueled by love and the shared wonders of the Bard and America’s game. - Courtney Lehmann, Tully Knoles Professor of the Humanities at the University of the Pacific