One of the best known sentences in Shakespeare, indeed in all of literature, is Mercutio’s curse as he dies at Tybalt’s hand: “A plague on both your houses”. And one of the major reasons for the deaths of both Romeo and Juliet is the failure of Friar Laurence to let Romeo know the details of […]
Juliet’s death is, among other things, a supreme act of rebellion. As a teenage undergraduate I had to read all of Shakespeare’s plays and write essays about themes and characterization, philosophy and structure. I recall an essay I wrote about female characters and rebellion: I was dreamily in love with an actress I had seen […]
Shakespeare set about thirteen of his plays wholly or partly in Italy. An incomplete list includes: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and of course Romeo and Juliet. We […]
While you’re reading this article you might want to listen to an excerpt from the Fantasia-Overture of Romeo and Juliet (1880) by Peter Tchaikowsky: https://youtu.be/izfAH-edobk. The performance speaks to the global presence of Romeo and Juliet. The composer was Russian, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is from Amsterdam, and the conductor, Elim Chan, is from Hong […]
It has become a truism that Shakespeare’s plays are rich and complex. That is one of the reasons they have remained at the top of the chart for five centuries, not just in their Elizabethan English originals but in other languages and other artistic media such as opera. But that complexity can often seed confusion […]
Once, when I disagreed with the Artistic Director of Curtain Theatre about the meaning of a passage from Twelfth Night, she smiled an enigmatic smile and said “Yes, academics love that passage.” She looked at me with a certain amount of empathy and after a few loaded moments she said, “But I have to make […]
“This fellow is wise enough to play the fool And to do that well craves a kind of wit (3,i,24-5) In one of my favorite scenes in Twelfth Night, Feste, a jester employed by the household of the Countess Olivia and usually referred to as the Fool, returns from an unexplained absence. “Take the […]
“Queer has been defined theoretically as ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant …, as that which is ‘not yet conscious’ …; as the very status of unthinkability’.” Clara Bradbury Rance, Lesbian Cinema After Queer Throry, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, p.10 In my post on this website, Master-Mistress: Love, gender […]
The use of pronouns might seem random in Shakespeare’s plays, and it is sometimes, perhaps often, the case that usage depends on the actor or prompt who wrote down or marked the original script. However, it is useful to note that there were subtle class and social distinctions between apparently ordinary or neutral forms of […]
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” So begins Twelfth Night…… No? Oh, right you are. Yep, that’s the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, written by some woman called Jane a couple of centuries later. Though it might […]