In which I share my first three sabbatical–I mean retirement–book projects.
Columnist George Will calls Mike Pence a cross between Elmer Gantry and Uriah Heep. I see the two and raise to a Dante sycophant and Shakespeare’s Cassius.
Posted in Dante, Dickens (Charles), Lewis (Sinclair), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged Charles Dickens, Dante, David Copperfield, Elmer Gantry, Inferno, Julius Caesar, Mike Pence, Sinclair Lewis |
“Macbeth,” a psychological study of a tyrant, also illumines aspects of Donald Trump.
Over the weekend, Trump’s new National Security Adviser sent strong signals that he wants a war with Iran. Shakespeare’s Henry V had similar advisers.
Our English Department’s Sigma Tau Delta induction ceremony included passages from Willa Cather, Shakespeare, and Emily Dickinson.
Having winter intrude upon our spring has me quoting Burns and Shakespeare.
Stormy Daniels’s power over Donald Trump brings to mind various literary storms, such as Lear’s and those described by Mary Oliver and H.D.
Someone I love very dearly has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I turn to “Sonny’s Blues” and “King Lear” to find adequate words.
The spread of Trumpian corruption is an instance of the fish rotting from the top. “King Lear” shows this process at work.
My lectures on Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Shakespeare and Sophocles all seem to track back to Lent these days.
Posted in Baldwin (James), O'Connor (Flannery), Shakespeare (William), Sophocles | Also tagged Flannery O'Connor, Good Man Is Hard to Find, James Baldwin, King Lear, Lent, Oedipus at Colonus, Sonny's Blues, Sophocles, Suffering |
An account of a dinner with an old Slovenian friend and intellectual.
Posted in Beckett (Samuel), Marivaux (Pierre de), Plato, Shakespeare (William), Sophocles | Also tagged intellectual conversations, Ion, King Lear, Mladen Dolar, Oedipus at Colonus, Pierre de Marivaux, Plato, Republic, Samuel Beckett, Sophocles, Wayne Booth, Worstward Ho |
Prospero’s final speech unexpectedly moved me to tears as I read it aloud recently to my British Fantasy class.
To see the decline of the GOP as a Shakespeare drama, one must draw on “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,,” “Henry IV,” and “King Lear.” And throw in Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.”
For years my Intro to Lit class has had a nature theme.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Bacchae, Barbara Kingsolver, climate change, environmental issues, Euripides, Flight Behavior, John Keats, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lord Byron, Lucille Clifton, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, Midsummer Night's Dream, nature poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wendell Berry, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Year of the Flood |
As he demonstrates in “Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare would understand the ins and outs of modern sexual assault politics.
John McCain is John of Gaunt to John Kelly’s Coriolanus. Guess which one loves his country more.
Lear is driven mad by his assertive daughters. Are strong women like the San Juan mayor also sending Trump around the bend?
When compared to people called “dotard” in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Trump fits the insult hurled at him by Kim Jong-un. His statement to African leaders, meanwhile, makes him sound like a “Heart of Darkness” ivory trader.
Do the classics make us better people. F. R. Leavis thinks so while Terry Eagleton disagrees and cites as an example concentration camp commandants who read Goethe.
Examining an upcoming trial by people who were tortured during the George W. Bush administration, Ariel Dorfman examines the face of Iago and the satisfaction we take at the tortures that await him.
In a fine “New Yorker” article, Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare was incapable to showing anything less than the full humanity of his characters, even the villains. He thereby liberates us from our “mental ghettos.”
Melancholy threatened to paralyze Abraham Lincoln in his early years. Literature helped him give voice to his depression and taught him how to turn it into an asset.
Posted in Byron (Lord Gordon), Poe (Edgar Allan), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged "Dream", "Raven", Abraham Lincoln, Depression, Edgar Allan Poe, First Inaugural Address, Macbeth, Manfred, unipolar disease |
This past March an ALS sufferer spoke eloquently, shortly before her death, about how she turned to Sophocles, Kafka, and Shakespeare for comfort.
Washington Post humorist Alexandra Petri has been having a lot of fun with Trump supporters’ attack on “Julius Caesar.” Here are some of her funniest barbs.
Posted in Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged Aleandra Petri, Crucible, Hamlet, Humor, Ice Man Cometh, Julius Caesar, Long Day's Journey into Night, Macbeth, Master Builder, Newt Gingrich, Raisin in the Sun, Rent |
Preeminent Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt calls out people for whining about the Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of “Julius Caesar.” After all, Queen Elizabeth I once had a Shakespeare play used against her in an attempted overthrow and just shrugged it off.
The Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of “Julius Caesar” has the Right up in arms about the image of Donald Trump being assassinated. The timeliest lesson of the play, however, is the way that Marc Antony slyly slides in to take power. Think of him as Mitch McConnell quietly preparing to repeal Obamacare and deprive millions of healthcare while the nation focuses on Senate hearings.
Everyday, it seems, Trump proves to us that he’s King Lear. The latest example is when he subjected his Cabinet to a love test.
When former FBI Director James Comey, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, quoted Henry II–“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest”–he brought to mind both T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” and Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” He took the right lessons from history by not murdering the Russia investigation.
A couple of years ago a former student opted for a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-themed wedding. For many reasons, it was a perfect choice.
Donald Trump is like Lear in that both are trapped in a loneliness of their own making and, in their despair, both make the lives around them miserable. Lear finds his soul again at the end of the play, however. It might take a similar adversity for Trump to do so as well.
“The Washington Post” recently found numerous parallels between Lear and our own president, with “his zigzagging proclamations, his grandiose promises, his spasmodic attachments.”
