Tag Archives: Hamlet

To Memorialize, Turn to Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2020

John Lewis’s mentor James Lawson read a Czeslaw Milosz poem at Lewis’s funeral, showing how deeply he understood social activism.

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How Trump Is Like and Unlike Claudius

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2020

Unlike Claudius in “Hamlet,” who at least thinks he is accountable to God, Trump doesn’t think he should be accountable to anyone.

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Check Out the Bard for Halloween

By Robin Bates | Published: October 30, 2019

Shakespeare does a great Halloween. Check out Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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Are We Watching Shakespeare or Beckett?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2019

Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]

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An Incel Killer and an English Major

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2018

Maura Binkley was an English major killed by an incel killer in a Tallahassee yoga studio. Her department chair turned to Shakespeare in his grief.

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Sen. Flake Is No Hamlet

By Robin Bates | Published: October 24, 2018

Comparisons of Sen. Flake to Hamlet over the Brett Kavanaugh is an insult to Hamlet.

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Fishing in the Mind

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2018

Thursday Can art be so vivid that it supersedes actual experience? Billy Collins makes such a claim in “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” where he conjures up images that may resonate with those who fish, even though Collins isn’t among them. His own experience, he freely admits, comes from museum paintings. Art precedes life, […]

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Trump & GOP as Shakespearean Drama

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2017

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.”

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Lit Comforts an ALS Sufferer

By Robin Bates | Published: June 23, 2017

This past March an ALS sufferer spoke eloquently, shortly before her death, about how she turned to Sophocles, Kafka, and Shakespeare for comfort.

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