It’s Prospero vs. Caliban in America, with Caliban having a very good chance of triumphing.
Tag Archives: Tempest
Caliban Defeats Prospero
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Donald Trump, Election 2024, Kamala Harris, Shakespeare Comments closed
The Dangerous Power of Libraries
Libraries as described by poet Paul Engle are sometimes repositories of dynamite, sometimes of comfort.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Library", Anna Karenina, C. S. Lewis, Grand Canyon, Julius Caesar, Leo Tolstoy, libraries, Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lolita, Louisa May Alcott, Merchant of Venice, Paul Hamilton Engle, Vladimir Nabokov, William Shakespeare Comments closed
What No Eye Has Seen, Nor Ear Heard
St. Paul writes about how our earthly senses are not enough to put us in touch with God. So does Bottom in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer.”
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Letter to the Corinthians, Midsummer Night's Dream, St. Paul, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Trump’s Havisham-Like Damage
Is Trump, like Miss Havisham, so embittered by his loss that he’s creating little Estelles, designed to break America’s heart.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, democracy threatened, Donald Trump, Frank Bruni, GOP, Great Expectations, Hillary Clinton, Trumpism, William Shakespeare Comments closed
What Lit Is Good For–A Debate
Thursday Tim Parks has written a provocative essay for The New York Review of Books, asking, Is literature wise? In the sense, does it help us to live? And if not, what exactly is it good for? If you follow this blog, you already know my answers: –Yes, literature is wiser than we are (and […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Herbert Marcuse, King Lear, Little Dorrit, Madame Bovary, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Tearful at Prospero’s Farewell
Prospero’s final speech unexpectedly moved me to tears as I read it aloud recently to my British Fantasy class.
Shakespeare Understood Trumpism
According to Adam Gopnik, Shakespeare would have understood the rise of Donald Trump better than we do today. Whereas we see him as a historical oddity, Shakespeare would have seen him as the kind of evil that has always resided within humankind.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged 2016 presidential election, Adam Gopnik, As You Like It, Donald Trump, Hamlet, Henry V, Hillary Clinton, King Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Comments closed
