Shakespeare
-
Hakuna Matata, Shakespeare
Shakespeare may have felt anxiety, but he was no worrier. More from The Economist on how the word entered our lexicon, in a review of Worrying by Francis O’Gorman. O’Gorman, who traces the word’s rise through literary modernism’s focus on…
-
The Creative Writing Class That Changed My Life
One could sense this passion in all of us. It seemed to fill the classroom as if it were part of the oxygen.
-
The Moral of the Story
At the New York Times, Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra discuss the role of moralism in the novel—and conclude that authors should seek to question and provoke rather than preach: Not only does moral preoccupation corrupt the artfulness of fiction, but…
-
Sonnets and Songs
“All good love songs are sad,” Paul McCartney, who knew, once told this reporter. The mystery is that while what we want is love fulfilled, what we actually feel most deeply about is love frustrated. What do Shakespeare’s love sonnets…
-
Bad Stories Told Well
At the Kenyon Review blog, Amit Majmudar explores how a bad story in the hands of someone like Shakespeare can turn into literary genius.
-
Lear’s Metrical Madness
As part as the Shakespeare on Tor series, Brian Stavely brings us on a quick tour of King Lear’s descent into madness, as evidenced by a careful metrical reading of five speeches. Following the aging monarch through his perfectly-pentametered Latinate…
-
More Lovely and More Temperate
There’s a lot to get excited about and offended by when reading Shakespeare with a feminist eye. NPR interviewed Tina Packer about her new book Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays, which chronicles how the playwright’s portrayal…
-
Shakespeare on the Verrazano
In 2013 Ross Williams began an ambitious project: film all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 154 different New York City locations, and reach “beyond the restrictions of a live performance in a small theater.” Now the project has taken a…
-
Word of the Day: Esemplasy
(n.); unification; to make into one; the unifying power of imagination; accredited to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Austen is far from superficial … Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with…
-
Free Speech and Fearless
If the meaning of a piece of writing changes over time, can we alter the past from a contemporary perspective? Over at Newsweek, Preti Taneja considers whether we should censor Shakespeare, a writer whose 16th century work has powerful 21st…
-
Ourselves and Our World
Sensational headlines declaiming the death of the humanities often misunderstand what the humanities actually are. Paul A. Kottman explains that the practice of analyzing texts doesn’t just teach us how to think; it creates new ways of thinking: Whatever we…
-
Changing Shakespeare
A French public library has discovered that the institution possesses a rare ‘first folio’ of the works of William Shakespeare. There are many first folios, but these earliest anthologies all contain variations in the texts. (The writing we have come…