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.”
Top 10 Literary Parent-Child Relationships from Hell.
“A plague on both your houses” doesn’t work for Mercutio or for citizens today.
The plays would have been different if Shakespeare’s characters had had access to social media.
What’s in a name? Would Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose by any other name smell as sweet?
“A plague on both your houses!” So I found myself venting at both Christian and Muslim zealots as I heard the recent news in Afghanistan. In this case, the Montagues were Pastor Terry Jones and his fundamentalist followers who burned a Koran in South Carolina while the Capulets were the fundamentalist Muslims (a crowd exiting a mosque) who attacked and killed United Nations workers in Afghanistan.
Image from Poltergeist I am pleased that Jason Blake, who teaches English at the University of Ljubljana, is becoming a regular contributor to this website. As an English speaker living in Slovenia, Jason is particularly sensitive to questions of language. In the following essay he triggers memories for me when he talks about how television, […]
I’ve been thinking recently about how every Shakespearean tragedy concludes with a restoration of order. The stage may be strewn with corpses and the spectator’s heart may have broken into a thousand little pieces, but (as though to provide some reassurance) someone steps forward at the end to set things straight. In Hamlet it is […]
