Tag Archives: Twelfth Night

Read “12th Night” for Relationship Advice

By Robin Bates | Published: April 5, 2022

In their essays on “Twelfth Night,” my students showed they are hungry for authentic relationships.

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Is the Left Attacking the Bard? Nope

By Robin Bates | Published: February 8, 2022

Seeking to bring back the 1990s culture wars, an “American Conservative” article claims the left is attacking Shakespeare. Nope.

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Condemned to Read Dickens, Austen

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2021

A British judge has ordered a white supremacist to read Dickens and Austen. Why these authors.

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The Bard, Rowling, and Trans Identity

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2020

The Supreme Court has just ruled to protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination, showing Shakespeare to be centuries ahead of his time. J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, needs to catch up.

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Same-Sex Desire in the Sonnets

By Robin Bates | Published: March 19, 2019

Wednesday If you want a one-stop article about the same-sex desire expressed in Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, Sandra Newman’s recent Aeon article is the place to go. Newman neatly summarizes the historical debates over the sonnets and pretty much puts the matter to rest: they really are expressions of homosexual love from Shakespeare to a […]

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Shakespeare Hated Bullies

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2019

Tuesday Last week a reader accused me of anti-Semitism for defending Merchant of Venice. While I’m always willing to learn new things about myself—personally, I think I have more trace elements in my system of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism than of anti-Semitism—the response sent me back to early recollections of the play. For […]

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How I Make Literary Connections

By Robin Bates | Published: January 30, 2019

Wednesday A friend the other day asked where my ideas come from, especially when I apply a passage from one century to incidents in another. Yesterday, for instance, I said that Trump confidant Roger Stone reminded me of a passage in Herman Melville’s Confidence Man. So how did that enter my head? To answer, let […]

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Shakespeare Would Support Transgenders

By Robin Bates | Published: February 22, 2017

As Donald Trump rolls back transgender protections, it’s worth going back to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which honors the sense that many have (not just transgender individuals) that they have the other gender hidden away beneath their exteriors.

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The Magic Spell Cast by Stories

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2016

In “1Q84” Murakami describes novels as holding out the promise to solve our problems only we can’t quite make them out.

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