Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Who’s Afraid of a Feuding Couple?

Is Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a feuding couples comedy? Perhaps yes if you add the adjective “dark.”

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Verbal Combat Trumps Soft Romance

Shaw contributed some great plays to the feuding couples comedy genre, including Man and Superman and Pygmalion.

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Desire vs. Law in Shakespeare, Euripides

If a play turns comic or tragic often depends how how the clash between law and desire is negotiated.

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Check Out the Bard for Halloween

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

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Feuding Beats Shrew-Taming

“Taming of the Shrew” may have set the stage for the far more egalitarian “Much Ado about Nothing,” which launched the feuding couples comedy.

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Feuding Couples Comedy

I have just begun teaching a “Feuding Couples Comedy” course. “Much Ado about Nothing” remains the quintessential example of the genre.

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“Et Tu, Brute!”–Betraying the Kurds

Which Shakespeare play best captures Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds? Julius Caesar, perhaps, for pathos, Othello for the cold-blooded way it was done.

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Which Literary Conman Is Trump?

To understand Trump as conman, I compare him to the King and the Duke, Mac the Knife, Melville’s Confidence Man, Satan & Iago.

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Couples Fighting: It Must Be Love

Tuesday I read plays all day yesterday with an eye toward an upcoming class on “Battling Couples in Theatre and Film (the Comic Version).” The September course is part of Sewanee’s “Lifelong Learning” series. As the course runs for four weeks, I will teach four plays and four movies, pairing a play with a film […]

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