William Shakespeare Makes an Unexpected Appearance at the Delacorte Theater!
William Shakespeare giving some thought to his next play as he stands at the foot of Literary Walk
Exactly how and where the bard makes his appearance is something I’ll let you discover as you read Central Park Story Book One, but he’s too important a person not to give top billing in my book, so I have him appear (unexpectedly, of course) in several of my scenes.
The statue to the right isn’t at the Delacorte Theater where his plays are performed each summer. It stands on Literary Walk next to the Olmsted Flower Bed at the foot of the promenade among other literary giants, such as Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
You may have noticed that his head is both prominent and bald. This is no accident. In the nineteenth century, prominent balding heads were considered a mark of intellectual superiority (an early form of racial profiling, I suppose). You see examples of this in the statue of Sir Walter Scott as well as other scholars in the same area whose craniums are also overinflated.
Too bad that balding in no longer trendy, or a lot of follicular-challenged men today would feel a lot better than they do!
