Of Low Extraction and Irregular Education
Salon has published another delightful excerpt from Jonathon Green’s The Vulgar Tongue: Green’s History of Slang. Where the first focused on sex euphemism, this piece explores slang’s impact on the…
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Shakespeare
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
Shakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention…
Does Shakespeare Suck?
In a response to Ira Glass’s “Shakespeare sucks” tweet, John Pistelli, at The Millions, wonders if the radio host’s social media outrage—specifically, that the characters in King Lear aren’t relatable—is…
What’s So Great about Relatability?
In the wake of a tweet by Ira Glass that called Shakespeare’s plays unrelatable, Rebecca Mead explores why we care so much about whether we can relate to a play, story or work of…
Privilege vs. Privilege
In an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by…
An Agnostic, Chortling Freelance Space-Yahoo
Amid all the meanings and uses that give a word its weight, it’s easy to forget that language is ultimately a system of arbitrary signs. Lexicographer Paul Dickson’s new book…
Shakespeare’s Women
In honor of the Bard’s 450th birthday, The Millions presents us with an analysis of Women Making Shakespeare, a new anthology from The Arden Shakespeare series edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and…
F. Scott Fitzgerald Does Othello
In honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday a couple days ago, the Paris Review posted some audio clips of him reading passages from Keats and Shakespeare. “While he may not recite…
Shakespeare As It Was Meant to Be Heard
Via 22 Words, here’s a video demonstrating how Shakespeare plays sound when performed in their original pronunciation. That’s right: the sonorous received pronunciation we associate with Shakespeare didn’t evolve until…
The Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia. Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But…
Shakespeare’s Plays: Fact or Fiction?
Has Shakespeare become so intertwined with our culture that we find it hard to separate myth from reality? Dan Jones at the Telegraph writes about how many of Shakespeare’s historical…