Whether a man named William Shakespeare actually authored the plays attributed to him is a question that has been raised by many observers since at least the nineteenth century. Notable figures, such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, all found persuasive the theory that someone else wrote the plays. Group theories of authorship—that [...]
A few days ago, whilst being driven around Tampa, I noticed a car bumper sticker telling me to “Just Be Nice.” For some reason this irritated me. Indeed it made me feel decidedly nasty. Why was this? Had I become a grumpy old man, an irascible curmudgeon, or, most contemptible of all, a latter-day Scrooge? [...]
My book Alias Shakespeare has come under attack from Stratfordian scholars and critics, as one might expect. Most recently it has been the target of a long, captious review by Alan H. Nelson of Berkeley in The Shakespeare Quarterly (Fall 1999), that bastion of Shakespearean orthodoxy (published, of course, by the Folger Shakespeare Library). But [...]
“Macbeth” was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play. Although he had a passing acquaintance with many of Shakespeare’s plays, he was more familiar with some than with others, and thought himself as intimate with a few as the scholars and actors who made it their profession to study them. A few years before my grandmother died, she [...]
Last week, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, I focused on the “eternal Shakespeare,” arguing that Shakespeare is timeless and therefore, and paradoxically, that he is also timely. Here are a few of the timeless truths in Shakespeare that are also and always timely. In Romeo and Juliet the difference between true and [...]
Shakespeare “It was William of Occam,” writes Richard Weaver in his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences, “who propounded the fateful idea of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.” Weaver compares this development in the intellectual history of Western man to Macbeth’s ominous meeting with the Weird Sisters: “Have we forgotten our [...]
Under the listings of Shakespeare, the Internet abounds in essays, reviews, texts, and comments, almost anything one can imagine about his works and about works explaining his works. My Viking Edition of Shakespeare comes to 1,471 pages. I suspect that at least that number of pages of new materials about Shakespeare appears almost every month. [...]
In “Macbeth,” Roman Polanski shows that even fidelity to Shakespeare can leave plenty of room for surprise. The film’s images capture the story’s paradoxes. April 12 was Shakespeare’s birthday. The real Shakespeare, I mean: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. I thought a little celebrating was in order, so I watched one of the best [...]