Thomas More’s Words Are Still Appropriate Today
I can always find something in Shakespeare’s works to console, inform, delight, or move me, and more often than not, something that is remarkably relevant to current issues and events.…
Shakespeare
Exeunt, Chased By a Bear: When Stage Fright Bites
Okay, strap yourself in for my harrowing tale of stage fright. Imagine, gentles, we are back in the author’s undergraduate days, and his required history… The post Exeunt, Chased By…
The Cancer Diaries, Part 30
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together… (Shakespeare: All’s Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc II.) Elumbated.* It’s an archaic word meaning…
Musings on Shakespeare Guidebooks
Unless you’re an academic who has studied The Bard for your entire career, you really need a guide, a Virgil if you will, to enter the dark forest of Shakespeare…
Books of Quotations from Shakespeare
A good book of selected quotations from Shakespeare is a nice complement to the collected works. Properly arranged, it lets you find relevant aphorisms, and speeches on a wide variety…
Musings on the Complete Works
When the Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works arrived this week (an early birthday gift from my wife who might have wanted to hide it until the actual date… oops… I saw…
Musings on Shakespearean Apocrypha
When the First Folio was published in 1623, it had 36 of the Bard’s plays, listed in three categories: histories, tragedies, and comedies (it didn’t include his longer poems, or…
Musings on Montaigne’s Cannibals
Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals contributed at least some of the content and ideas in Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest. A speech by the recently-shipwrecked counsellor Gonzalo in Act 2, Sc.1…
Musings on Shakespeare’s Anachronisms
When the clock struck three in Julius Caesar, you probably scratched your head, knowing that striking clocks didn’t exist two millennia ago in the play’s setting. In Caesar’s time, people…
Musings on Shakespeare’s Goodbye
Prospero’s words in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, have long been thought to have been Shakespeare’s own goodbye to the theatrical world, assuming, of course, you are reading the play or…
More Musings on Shakespeare
The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, Penguin Books, 2002) has a short but insightful essay on the texts of Shakespeare that illustrates the choices…
Musing on the Authorship Question Again
The “authorship question” — who wrote Shakespeare’s works, aside that is, from Shakespeare himself — is a conspiracy that seems a metaphor for modern society. It contains the seeds of…
Musings on Downsizing Shakespeare
While downsizing my library earlier this spring (25-30 boxes of books already removed from the shelves and some titles still left to cull), I had to think about what books…
Musings on Poets and Poetry
For me, reading the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, is often like wading in molasses. Intellectual molasses, to be sure, but slow going nonetheless. His writing is thick with difficult…
Shakespeare’s Mirror
Grant that, and then is death a benefit. So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, And let us bathe our hands…
Review: The Serpent of Venice
The Serpent of Venice is a mash-up extraordinaire of The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Cask of Amontillado, starring Pocket, the lead from Moore’s… Continue ReadingReview: The Serpent of…
Misquoting Shakespeare. Again.
Let me begin with a digression on memes. Like a virus, a meme can spread uncontrollably in the right environment and infect millions with an idea or goal. This, of…