What follows are some ad hoc notes towards a 30-minute presentation I am to give to the Shakespeare and Contemporary Authors Society Annual Conference at the Kenritsu Hiroshima Daigaku on 6th September to an audience of Japanese professors and lecturers of English literature. The presentation will be given in English. [Read more…]
The town of Elsinore on the East coast of Denmark attracts thousands of visitors every year. Their destination is Kronberg Castle, or “Hamlet’s Castle” as it has come to be known. The castle was built by King Eric VII in the early fifteenth century. Its purpose was to command the [Read more…]
The Elizabethans inherited from the middle ages a view of man’s body as being composed of a mixture of the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, which were supplied by the intake of food. The liver converted food into four different kinds of liquids, or “humours”, which in turn [Read more…]
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…]
“Madness, good, bad, or merely medical, underlies a great deal of Renaissance thought, worship, morals, literature and humour… Aristotle believed that many madmen, and all geniuses, were melancholic, an assertion he explained with the help of Plato: he took the inspiration of the true genius to be one of the [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…]
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