I want my students to fall madly in love with Rosalind. She’s my favorite of all Shakespeare’s heroines, I tell them, pressing my hand to my heart, pretending to swoon.
As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as...
