The default position with Shakespeare is to favor bold revisions over the poetic wisdom in the plays themselves. Why not let Shakespeare be what he is? In a recent piece for the New York Times, Drew Lichtenberg, the artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, laments the closing of the California Shakespeare Theater [...]
Can we fail to see the significance of Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence,” uttered immediately before Horatio’s prayer from the Requiem Mass? Since "requiem" means “rest” in Latin, can we avoid the suspicion that Shakespeare is alluding to the “something rotten” in the state of England which has silenced the Requiem Mass and [...]
The same dynamic on display in Shakespeare's "Othello" plays out within the human heart. There is an inner Iago who lies to us, and we want to believe that liar and believe that he is honest and loves us. Do we swallow his lies, or challenge his deception with the astringent face-splash of truth? The [...]
Those who fail to share my profound admiration for William Shakespeare will no doubt query my apparent obsession with one author to the exclusion of all others, as I propose an ideal classical curriculum for the freshman and sophomore years of high school. In last week’s essay I presented the texts that I would include [...]
Beneath the politics, the power plays, and the sibling rivalry, darker currents are running in Shakespeare's plays. In showing these dark forces murmuring below the surface, was Shakespeare also hinting at the rumors of occult dabblings in the Tudor and Jacobean courts? Imaginative Conservative contributor Joseph Pearce has produced, with Ignatius Press, a series of [...]
The reconstructed Globe theater is a masterpiece, a beautiful dream-come-true and a wonderful contribution to the universal Shakespeare industry. If only the productions of the Bard’s plays were as authentic as the theater in which they are performed, instead of being the puerile pastiches that their producers foist upon us. It was a glorious June [...]
Shakespeare’s sisters come in all shapes and sizes, good, bad and ugly. So do his men. He believed in the mystical equality of the sexes and the inherent dignity of the human person because he knew that all men and women are made in the image of God. It’s almost a century since Virginia Woolf [...]
It is always a dangerous and potentially deadly error to consider the enemy of our enemies to be our friend, patting him on the back while he is stabbing us in ours. The truth is that Dr. Harold Bloom is himself a servant of dark forces, which are subtler by far than those politically oriented [...]
Shakespeare’s plays are an education in human nature, an encyclopedia of experience, to compare and contrast with all the people in our daily lives. What we see in Shakespeare’s plays are real persons, like the all flawed folks around us, coming to terms with their “backstories”—what they’ve built or destroyed—and being redeemed by love. Simply [...]
The scholarly debate over Shakespeare and his family, especially with respect to their Catholic sympathies, remains a hot topic. For those who don’t share these sympathies, or are positively antagonistic to them, the evidence that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic is unwelcome and, for some, simply unacceptable. The recent claim by Matthew Steggle, writing in [...]
William Shakespeare is a mystery. What we know about the facts of his life is outweighed by what we don’t know. His life can be likened metaphorically to a jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces are missing. It is no wonder, therefore, that he continues to puzzle historians. One of the most puzzling [...]
William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, died April 23, 1616) is arguably the greatest writer in any language. Shakespeare’s classical poetry is not only one of the most exalted examples of what an immortal sense of creative identity can accomplish, it is a symbol of the artist’s immortality, and timelessness itself. As today’s coronavirus crisis [...]
Those who read as Shakespeare wrote, seeing the facts in the light of the truth they serve, will be servants of that greater science animated by a love of wisdom (philosophy) and of the greatest of all sciences which leads to a knowledge of God (theology). Those who read reality in this way are never [...]
In his last moments, Brutus voiced a sentiment about the ultimate tragedy of the virtuous life in those evil days, in which the good was punished and the evil rewarded. This does not make virtue worthless for the individual; it just may place him on the losing side. [E]veryone knows that some young bucks among [...]