Stephen Booth (April 20, 1933 – November 22, 2020) was a professor of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a leading Shakespearean scholar. Life Booth studied at Harvard University (A.B., Ph.D.) and the University of Cambridge (B.A., M.A.) where he was a Marshall Scholar. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1970-71. In 1991, Georgetown University gave him an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. He received the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1995. Booth first attracted attention with his controversial 1969 essays On the Value of Hamlet and An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. He pointed out the "mental gymnastics" of close reading. He notes that "all of us were brought up on the idea that what poets say is sublime – takes us beyond reason; my commentary tries to describe the physics by which we get there." Frank Kermode praised On the Value of Hamlet in the New York Review of Books in 1970 as being worth several full books of Shakespeare studies. In 1977 he published an edition with "analytic commentary" of the sonnets for which he won both the 1977 James Russell Lowell Prize and the 1978 Explicator Prize. Shakespeare's Sonnets, Edited with Analytic Commentary was well-received, described as a "heroic enterprise" and "something of a miracle." Paul Alpers, a pre-eminent scholar of the English Renaissance said that Booth's close readings are the "equivalent of a scientific breakthrough." G. F. Waller, of the Dalhousie Review, said his edition "constitute[d] a landmark in Shakespearean criticism... [It] is a work of first-rate importance, hopefully a precursor of a long-needed revolution in our understanding of reading Shakespeare." Booth published King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy in 1983, probably his best-known work after the study of the sonnets. His most recent book, Precious Nonsense: The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's Epitaphs on His Children, and Twelfth Night explores "what is it we value literature for. And what is it in the works we value most highly that makes us value them above others like them." These questions are central to his literary analysis. Works Among Booth's published works are: The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles: An Account of Its Inception, Purposes, Contributors, Contents, Publication, Revision, and Influence on William Shakespeare. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1969. "On the Value of Hamlet" in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama: