Harry Berger Jr. and the Tree of Acknowledgment

This review essay takes as its jumping off point the collection of fine essays published in honor of Harry Berger Jr. in "A Touch More Rare": Harry Berger Jr. and the Arts of Interpretation, edited by Nina Levine and David Lee Miller. Focusing on Berger's Shakespeare criticism, it attempts to give some sense of Berger's phenomenal importance as both reader and writer over the long career in which he has held fast to New Critical practices while remaining forever responsive to newer critical and disciplinary ways of looking at texts and images.