A note on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's decision to "translate" Shakespeare's plays for a contemporary audience.

Though Shakespeare may not have invented parapraxes, he certainly exploited their psychological depths long before Freud. 

Shakespeare's literal afterlife and the status of the Humanities in the twenty-first century. 

Plays have to end, but no one so well as Shakespeare understood how to use them to offer the hospitality of time, the interim of friendship.

It is already 20 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union.  We were the generation who was filled with hope in 1989, who expected great transformation of the world after the demise of the totalitarian state.  We expected so much.

My Shakespeare class finally persuaded me to take a class trip to go see the new Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. I went forewarned. Multiple reviewers have pointed out problems with the film, which proposes that the Earl of Oxford wrote the literature by William Shakespeare.

the erotic maskWorn the world over by illusionTo weddings of itself and simple need.

Following up on my earlier post on Nantucket, as well as all the discussion here about Ngrams, I want to offer a few spontaneous speculations based on a new paper that's the talk of at least a couple of neighborhoods in the town.

I was intrigued by this (abstract) mathematical analysis of structural balance in social groups because I was teaching Richard II all week, and thinking about my favorite book on Shakespeare, Richard Decker's Anatomy of the Screenplay.

You know how people will sometimes hum a phrase or say a word or two that haunts them, as though just that phrase, just those words, could mean everything? It's the literary equivalent of the magical name of the beloved. I need only think: Belinda or Geoffrey