Shakespeare

A Daily Plan for Reading Shakespeare

Yes, you can read all of Shakespeare's works in a year. Continue Reading »

What We've Been Reading—12.9.16

I've been immersed in Shakespeare's King Lear, but not solely as a text on a page. I'm acting in a production of the play here in New York City, playing the King of France and the Servant who stands up to Cornwall in the famous eye-gouging scene. Continue Reading »

Hazarding All

The play begins and ends in the romantic world of magical, musical, moonlit Belmont, and in between descends into the gritty business of Venice. From the start, though, romantic and commercial concerns are linked. Continue Reading »

Surprised by Evil

Macbeth’s ambition is to murder time itself. He wishes he could perform one act that would bring the end of acting, one final deed. He wants to drop a pebble into a pool without causing ripples. He finds he can’t, and instead each murder just makes it more difficult for him to stop murdering. Continue Reading »

“To Trump, or Not to Trump”

To Trump, or not to Trump, that is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the land to suffer
The tweets and twaddles of outrageous baseness
Or to take arms against an orange menace
And, by opposing…do what? . . . . Continue Reading »

Shakespeare the Conservative?

Writing at Salon, Colin MacDonald urges us to dispense with the “myth” of the conservative Shakespeare, the Shakespeare who endorsed the divine right of kings and genuflected to his royal patrons. To MacDonald, a poet who has Lear say, “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, . . . . Continue Reading »

Shakespeare, Four Centuries On

This Saturday, April 23rd, marks an important anniversary: four hundred years since the death of William Shakespeare. Or, at least, four centuries on from the traditional date of Shakespeare's death, dated backwards from his funeral on April 25th, 1616. Similarly, Shakespeare's birthday is not . . . . Continue Reading »

To Render the Deeds of Mercy

A version of the following talk was given at the Shelbourne Easter Seminar on March 29, 2015. Shakespeare had a Catholic imagination. He loved to write about monastic and religious characters; he had a keen sense of sacramentality in symbol; and his work seemed to reflect the themes of Catholic . . . . Continue Reading »

Shakespeare Through Anecdotes

Did you hear the one where . . . ?

Paul Menzer has heard it. He’s heard the one with the drunk Richard III, the one with the fat Ghost of Hamlet’s Father stuck in the trapdoor, the one with the father–daughter pair playing Romeo and ­Juliet, the one where Othello’s makeup rubs off on Desdemona’s face to give her a beard. In fact, he’s probably heard several variations on any given Shakespearean anecdote, a handful verifiable, but most patently recycled, exaggerated, or apocryphal—yet in a different sense, in Menzer’s paradoxical view, no less true. Continue Reading »

Hamlet the Confessor

Two millennia ago, a Jewish rabbi declared that he had the authority to forgive sins or “send away mistakes” and transferred that authority to his closest followers. An early follower, Tertullian, called the action of repentance and forgiveness a “plank” for a “shipwrecked man.” The . . . . Continue Reading »