29 October 1990
Correspondence
The New Republic
1220 19th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
To the Editors:
I bet you're getting lots of letters correcting you for attributing Our Town -- rather than On the Town and Wonderful Town -- to Leonard Bernstein. I, however, want to compliment you on this creative misprint. It opens up all sorts of happy possibilities: Conrad as the author of Lucky Jim, for example, and Shakespeare as the author of The Hamlet, not to mention The Sound and the Fury. On the other hand, some errors simply can't be blamed on the printer. If Henry Louis Gates really thinks that Shakespeare wrote "My love is like a red, red rose" [as reported in TNR, November 12, 1990], he is in for a surprise. I won't tell him what it is, but he can find out for himself by checking out the pages devoted to Robert Burns in the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Sincerely,
Rosalind
Kolnikov
