The word “turbulent” occurs only three times in Shakespeare, once in Timon of Athens, once in Pericles, and once in Hamlet, when Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, And can you by no drift of circumstance Get from him why he puts on this confusion, Grating so harshly all his days [Read more…]
I was giving a short talk on the Bayeux Tapestry to a class the other day and mentioned that another word for “tapestry” is “arras“. It was then that, while one part of my mind looked after the waffle about the Bayeux Tapestry, the other went wandering off to Denmark… [Read more…]
In the ninth verse of The Pheonix and the Turtle, Shakespeare wrote: So betweene them Love did shine, That the Turtle saw his right, Flaming in the Pheonix sight; Either was the other’s mine In his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Ficino had written on the effect of love, about a [Read more…]
This afternoon, I finished the eighth chapter of C. L. Barber‘s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, titled “Rule and Misrule in Henry IV“. The chapter is polished off with a splendid paragraph which crackles with insights that both sum up and point beyond the discussion just concluded. “Historically, Shakespeare’s drama can be [Read more…]
I have nearly finished C. L. Barber‘s, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. I came across a remarkable passage today, on the 210th page, which refers to the way in which the Elizabethans thought about the relation between a man and the name of the role he performed in the “divinely ordained pageant” [Read more…]
In the brief sixth scene of the second act of Romeo and Juliet, while Romeo and Friar Laurence await the arrival of Juliet, Friar Laurence offers offers up this orison, expressive of a certain anxiety about the clandestine nature of the marriage ceremony: “So smile the heavens upon this holy [Read more…]
Here are some extracts from my current reading of C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy that I found of particular interest, either because of what was written or how it was written, or, best of all, both together. “No figure in the carpet is the carpet. There is in the [Read more…]
Last Monday I introduced some students to the game of “Shakespeare Hangman”. The word they had to get was “Shipwrecked”. They failed to get the “w” and “r” before they were hanged. I then left them with a homework question, namely: “Which Shakespeare play opens with a shipwreck?” Of course, [Read more…]
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