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The Gaze - November 16, 2007
David Bevington points out in his performance history of Shakespeare that in both Measure for Measure and The Tempest, the villainous characters are those that attempt to elude the all-seeing surveillance of the Duke and Prospero. Villains are particularly villainous...
Timon and the collapse of feudalism - November 07, 2007
I want to try to bridge the gap between medieval and Renaissance obsession with gift and gratitude and the Enlightenment where these are either privatized or reduced or ignored altogether. Let me begin with some additional thoughts on Timon of...
Seneca's failure - November 01, 2007
Wallace again on Timon of Athens. Wallace argues that Shakespeare has written a play to explore Seneca's society of benefits and gratitude, and shows that the classical model of social order is impossible: "the cast would appear to have been...
Senecan Shakespeare - November 01, 2007
In a 1986 article in Modern Philology, John Wallace argues that Timon of Athens is "Shakespeare's Senecan Study," reflecting on the issues raised by Seneca's de Beneficiis: "Shakespeare must have been thinking of Seneca, but a safer argument could have...
Roman trilogy - November 01, 2007
Paul Cantor describes three of Shakespeare's Roman plays as a trilogy, moving from the Republic (Coriolanus) to the early empire (Julius Caesar) to the decadence of Octavian (Antony and Cleopatra). Together they form "a kind of historical trilogy, dramatizing the...
Don't make em like that anymore - October 20, 2007
At 16, Hugo Grotius published a well-regarded edition of the notoriously difficult Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella....
Did Will Limp? - October 20, 2007
In 1921, Frank Harris argued that Shakespeare's art reveals the man: "As it is the object of a general to win battles, so it is the life-work of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which...
Austen and imperialism - October 11, 2007
Edward Said helped launch post-colonial criticism of Austen, arguing that Sir Thomas Bertram's expedition to Antigua, apparently accepted so casually by Austen and her characters, shows that she was an imperialist at heart. Simply by virtue of his standing in...
Anti-heroism - October 11, 2007
Critics say that Austen's work is too restricted. But, as Julia Prewitt Brown says, if this is true, it's hardly something that Austen would have been unaware of: "we must assume that Jane Austen was highly attuned to the unheroic...
Austen and her successors - October 10, 2007
In "What's Wrong With the World," Chesterton commented on the differences between eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction. Essentially, the eighteenth century was from Mars, the nineteenth from Venus. Austen developed her tastes and sensibilities in the eighteenth century, unfortunately often...
Jane Austen enters heaven - October 10, 2007
Kipling was a Janeite, writing not only a short story about British soldiers forming a secret Janeite society in the trenches but also several poems. Here is one called "Jane's Marriage." JANE went to Paradise: That was only fair. Good...
Fulcrum of the church - September 26, 2007
John Updike wrote that the ending of Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God "proved unexpected and, as I think about them, beautifully resonant, tragic and theological. That Ezeulu, whom we had seen stand up so invincibly to both Nwaka and Clarke,...
Bowdlerized Austen, 2 - September 10, 2007
Austen's great-nephew Lord Brabourne perpetuated the Victorianized Austen in his edition of Austen's letters. He found Regency England far too frank and coarse for his tastes, and removes Austen's occasional comments about the seeming perpetual pregnancies of her sisters-in-law and...
Bowdlerized Austen - September 10, 2007
In his Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England, Roger Sales tells about the formation of the "Austen industry." The industry, Sales claims, started nearly as soon as Austen was in the grave. Her brother Henry's memoir, published the year...
Pauline Wordsworth - August 27, 2007
In a 1993 article in the Review of English Studies, Colin Pedley points out the similarities between the cadences of this passage from "Tintern Abbey" and Paul's triumphant conclusion to Romans 8: My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I...
Jane's tough world - August 20, 2007
In early August, Lev Grossman wrote a piece for Time on the continuing apotheosis of Jane Austen: "It was a cliché 10 years ago to say that the Austen phenomenon was big. It has now burst completely out of its...
Dickens, mythologist - August 17, 2007
Chesterton admits that Dickens's characters neither affect nor are affected by time or circumstances. This is, he says, because Dickens was constructing myths rather than novels: "Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the...
Macbeth and modernity - August 15, 2007
Horst Breuer writes in a 1976 articles from the Modern Language Review: "Strange as this may seem to readers unaccustomed to this kind of historical perspective, Macbeth's murder is a historically progressive act, an emancipation from feudalism and Catholicism, a...
Dickens's children - August 14, 2007
Chesterton on Dickens: "'I am an affectionate father,' [Dickens] says, 'to every child of my fancy.' He was not only an affectionate father, he was an ever-indulgent father. The children of his fancy are spoilt children. They shake the house...
Austen the Romantic? - August 10, 2007
Though Austen lived almost two decades into the nineteenth century, she is usually characterized as a writer of the eighteenth. Her aesthetic and tastes were set in stone by 1800 (when she was 25), and she was untouched by romanticism....
Austen the Abolitionist? - August 10, 2007
Gabrielle White offers an abolitionist reading of Austen's work, and of Emma specifically. Part of the evidence is circumstantial. Some of Austen's best-loved writers favored not only the abolition of the slave trade (which happened in 1807) but also the...
Austen and the Stuarts - August 07, 2007
In her history of England, written at 15, Austen declares her favor toward the Stuart dynasty. She writes comically, but beneath the fun she is in earnest. Irene Collins notes that her mother, Cassandra Leigh "liked to remember that her...
Jane Austen and the Presbyterians - August 07, 2007
Austen was a life-long Anglican, born to a C of E clergyman, with many C of E ministers in her extended family and ancestry and circle of acquaintances. Irene Collins notes, "Her maternal grandfather and her great uncle had been...
Christian politeness - August 07, 2007
Vicesimus Knox (1752 - 1821) - English minister, essayist, and campaigner for the end of war - was educated at St. John's Oxford, where George Austen (1731-1805), Jane's father, was a student and tutor in classics, and Knox later became...
War against artifice - August 05, 2007
According to American literary critic Harry Levin, the modern novel is born from a war against artifice. The problem is, How is a novelist to create an appearance of life-like realism? The answer, from Cervantes on, is to reject "that...
Little Red Pentecostal - July 09, 2007
The earliest known version of "Little Red Riding Hood" comes from Egbert of Liege's school trivium textbook Fecunda natis (The Richly Laden Ship, c. 1022/24). Egbert's verse version, which appears to be drawn from an oral folktale, begins with Red's...
After Dark - July 02, 2007
It's nearly midnight, and nineteen-year-old Mari Asai sits reading a thick book in a lonely Denny's in central Tokyo. Tall, lanky, long-haired Takahashi enters the restaurant carrying a trombone case, walks by her table, recognizes her, and introduces himself as...
The meaning of "Literature" - May 12, 2007
Michael Hattaway writes, in an introduction to Early Modern English literature (Blackwell, 2005), "A primary difference between Renaissance and modern concepts of writing involves meanings for 'literature' and for 'fiction.' As surviving library catalogues reveal, contemporaries of Donne and Shakespeare...
Austen's faith - May 02, 2007
The following is taken from an essay by Michael Wheeler in Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge). He points out that growing up in a clergyman's house, and with two clergyman as brothers, Austen's life was intertwined with the church and...
Austen's prayers - May 01, 2007
There are three evening prayers of Austen herself extant. According to Michael Wheeler, they are written in a standard form: "a plea for grace, a petition for mercy on the day’s sins, thanksgivings for blessings, a petition for protection this...
Restless confinements - April 24, 2007
In a 1971 article, Ann Banfield writes, "If Mansfield is 'modern, airy, and well-situated,' the house at Sotherton, 'built in Elizabeth's time' and 'furnished in the taste of fifty years back,' is 'ill-placed,' for 'it stands in one of the...
Ordination and revolt - April 24, 2007
In an article in Studies in English Literature (2004), Michael Karounos notes that "The meaning of ordination was not restricted in 1814 to the meaning of assuming a religious office, nor, indeed, was that its primary definition. A glance at...
Suicide against property - April 23, 2007
The violent are confined to the seventh circle of Dante's hell, which is divided among those who commit violence against neighbors, against themselves, and against God. In the second category, those who commit violence against themselves, are not only suicides,...
Cruel imagination - April 17, 2007
JS Lawry says that Emma insults Miss Bates in an effort to liven up a dull party: "Like a virtuoso, she takes care that her art be equal to its occasions – but no more. Later, when a party seems...
Rousseau and Austen - April 17, 2007
Rousseau is not the only source of sentimentality in novels, the literature of sensibility. There are English resources, such as the free prayer tradition, which made spontaneity the test of sincerity. But Rousseau is one of the sources of this...
Emma's paradise - April 17, 2007
Like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse's desires for her man are awakened while exploring his property, Donwell Abbey with "all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending." That...
Troubadours and courtly love - April 16, 2007
In his book, The Reign of Chivalry, Richard Barber gives a very fine summary of the courtly love tradition and the romantic tradition that it produced. I reproduce here only some of the main points of his discussion of the...
France and England in Emma - April 10, 2007
In Emma, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has pointed out, the writing of letters is an index of character. Writing letters is itself less manly and direct that face-to-face speech, and the kinds of letters one writes reveal the person. Frank...
Jane Austen, Detective - April 10, 2007
PD James devotes a considerable amount of space to Austen in her autobiography, including biographical details about Austen and an appendix where she analyzes Emma as a "detective story." She notes that detective stories don't need to have murder, but...
Publication of Emma - April 10, 2007
As Claire Tomalin points out, Austen had two bursts of creativity during her lifetime. The first came in her early twenties, when she wrote the early versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice within about a...
Hamlet and the Prayer Book - April 06, 2007
More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet's relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that "what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging...
Jane Austen, Economist - April 03, 2007
England's economy in Austen's time was still dominated by land ownership. Land was the most settled and permanent form of wealth, and writers like Coleridge and Burke asserted that landownership formed a "natural" governing class that had a physical stake...
Novels and social reform - April 02, 2007
Many early novelists aimed at social reform. Were they successful? According to a 1870 reviewer of J.E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, they were: "it is the increase of knowledge among the wealthier classes which has stimulated their sympathies for...
Auden on Austen - March 28, 2007
With his usual critical insight, Auden captured Austen's knowingness in a poem about Byron: You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English...
Communal Judgment, Communal Argument - March 27, 2007
William Deresiewicz of Columbia wrote a 1997 article in an issue of English Literary History that illuminates the issues in Pride and Prejudice very nicely. He starts at the beginning: Unlike other novels, Austen opens Pride and Prejudice not with...
Austen and Prejudice - March 27, 2007
Austen's Pride and Prejudice is often interpreted by linking the principal characters with the two flaws of the title. Darcy is "pride" and Elizabeth "prejudice." This way of reading the book gets at some important themes, but it doesn't quite...
Keeping us reading - March 27, 2007
An old essay by Edd Winfield Parks explores the question of how Austen gets us to move on to the next chapter. She doesn't, he points out, use cliff-hanger chapter endings, like a John Grisham novel. What keeps us reading?...
Jane Austen, Detective - March 26, 2007
PD James, who knows whereof she speaks, once remarked, "I think if Jane Austen were writing today, she might very well be our greatest mystery novelists."...
Richardson's children - March 13, 2007
What is going on in Samuel Richardson's fiction that can shape such diverse offspring as Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, and Jane Austen (who loved Sir Charles Grandison)?...
Auden on tragedy - February 27, 2007
Auden distinguished Christian and pagan tragedy: "Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity, i.e., the felling aroused in the spectators is 'What a pity it had to be this way': Christian tragedy is the tragedy of possibility, 'What a pity...
The power of song - February 13, 2007
Wordsworth's 30th Ecclesiastical Sonnet, on Canute: A PLEASANT music floats along the Mere, From Monks in Ely chanting service high, While-as Canute the King is rowing by: "My Oarsmen," quoth the mighty King, "draw near, "That we the sweet song...
Cat poets - February 12, 2007
Smart says of his cat Jeoffry: For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins. For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary . . . For he counteracts the Devil, who is...
Divine physics - February 12, 2007
More Smart: For FRICTION is inevitable because the Universe is FULL of God's works. For the PERPETUAL MOTION is in all the works of Almighty GOD. For it is not so in the engines of man, which are made of...
Spiritual colors - February 08, 2007
Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Agno while confined in a madhouse. He would have said, no doubt, he found his sanity there. Newtonians, they are the madmen: For Newton's notion of colours is ALOGOS unphilosophical. For the colours are spiritual. ....
Criminal linen - February 08, 2007
In May 1757, Christopher Smart, Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, renowned poet, writer for John Newbery, was involuntarily incarcerated in a London madhouse, where he spent the next seven years. His crime: Spontaneous public prayer, which arose from his conviction...
Longfellow lives - February 06, 2007
Another sign that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is being noticed again is the publication of Christoph Irmscher's Longfellow Redux, reviewed in the January 5 TLS. Several things about Longfellow are striking: First, what Irmscher calls his "relentless availability" to readers, not...
King's Theology - February 06, 2007
Stephen King, that is. Ross Douthat has an interesting article on King in the current issue of First Things. He places King's novels in the context of modern fiction, which has ignored supernatural events and beings: "King has effectively expanded...
Melancholy of Beowulf - January 29, 2007
Tolkein captured the feel of Beowulf more accurately than anyone: "Beowulf is not an 'epic,' not even a magnified 'lay.' No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we...
Deeper horror - January 28, 2007
Terrence Rafferty reviews a couple of recent horror novels in the NYT - John Saul's In the Dark of the Night and Joe Schreiber's Chasing the Dead. Both, he says, fail to deliver on the hints of deeper horror they...
Moby Dick and America - January 22, 2007
The following summarizes the argument of David W. Noble in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden. In Redburn, Melville wrote, "We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western...
Billy Budd - January 22, 2007
Some notes from a lecture on Melville's Billy Budd. Billy Budd was written in the last few years of Melville's life, and was not published until three decades after his death. It has been common to interpret the novel as...
Himmelfarb on Hard Times - January 15, 2007
Gertrude Himmelfarb has an excellent discussion of Hard Times in her book on poverty in the Victorian era. Below are some highlights. As Himmelfarb sees things, the problem in Coketown is not the factory but the way the factory spreads...
Dickens and Modernity: Background - January 15, 2007
This is the opening portion of a lecture on Dickens's Hard Times, but I want to examine Dickens not only as an artist but in relation to his fictional depiction of what we think of as "modernity." Modernity is in...
Dickens and the French Revolution: Background - January 15, 2007
A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the original revolution, usually dated to the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. This stood to Dickens's time approximately as WW II...
Roth's Everyman - January 12, 2007
Philip Roth, Everyman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 182 pp. Paperback, $13.00. When Death comes to fetch him in the medieval morality play, Everyman is abandoned by Friends, Kin, Beauty, and Goods. At least Good Works, purified through penance, accompanies him...
Oxford Companion - December 30, 2006
The new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by novelist Margaret Drabble, is a superb, entirely updated reference work. The range is astonishing: As one would expect, it includes biographical entries for British poets and novelists from...
Living in fictions - December 27, 2006
In a discussion of King Lear, David Bevington suggests that Edgar saves his father at the cliffs of Dover by constructing a cosmology in which the gods are merciful and perform miracles: "Edgar stages his fiction in this particular way...
Tyranny of gratitude - December 27, 2006
Many of Shakespeare's plays explore the moral and political consequences of ingratitude, but Shakespeare is also cognizant of the tyrannical uses to which the demand for gratitude may be put. Lear is certainly about ingratitude, the "marble-hearted fiend" that infects...
Rise of fictionality - November 27, 2006
Novels, we say, are long prose fictions, but general the terms of that definition are left unexamined. What is "prose" after all? What, Catherine Gallagher wants to ask, is fiction? And how did fictionality become established as the matter-of-factly defining...
The Novel - November 27, 2006
Several of my recent posts were taken from essays in Franco Moretti's recent collection, The Novel (Princeton). The two-volume English translation abridges the six volumes of the Italian original. The essays are so suggestive that one is tempted to take...
Chinese novels - November 27, 2006
During the sixteenth century, a little before the novel took shape in Western Europe, a very similar form of prose fiction was being developed in China. According to Andrew Plaks, "The significant areas of convergence between what we customarily call...
Ancient Greek Novels - November 27, 2006
Greek novels appear in the late Hellenistic period. One scholar suggests the "typical" Greek novel followed something like the following story-line: "These are novels of travel, adventure, and romantic love, taking place in a vaguely realistic Mediterranean or Near Eastern...
The Novel's Late Arrival - November 27, 2006
Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the...
Oral and Epic - November 27, 2006
Epic poetry is often seen as characteristic of orally based cultures, but Jack Goody argues that epic more normally appears at the beginning of literate cultures rather than in purely oral cultures. Referring to the research of Parry and Lord...
Herbert on Pop Music - October 31, 2006
Zbigniew Herbert writes in a poem entitled "Mr Cogito and Pop" of a visit to a concert. "Mr Cogito," a recurring character in Herbert's poems, reflects on the "aesthetics of noise" and offers some penetrating observations on the character of...
Shakespeare's bawdy - October 18, 2006
A couple of selections from Eric Partridge's book on the bawdy in Shakespeare. "Flatulence was, in Shakespeare's day, the source and the target of humour and wit among all classes: nowadays, its popularity as a subject is, in the main,...
The Moral of Henry V - October 14, 2006
Much of the moral and political import of Shakespeare's Henry V is left to the audience's or reader's judgment. Is Henry a "pig" or is he the mirror of Christian kings? Is his invasion of France fair or foul? Shakespeare...
The climax of Coriolanus - October 14, 2006
George Barnam notes the careful structure of Act 5 of Shakespeare's Coriolanus: "Shakespeare had used this scene structurally to build the tension toward the climactic moment when Volumnia should appeal to her son and prevail. Three appeals are made to...
Desacralized drama - October 13, 2006
In their "cultural history" of English drama, Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack summarize the argument of Glynne Wickham concerning the divorce of stage and sacred: "The English stage - so the argument runs - was predominantly a religious one until...
Individualization of the author - October 13, 2006
Foucault argued in his essay on the development of the "author-function" that the modern conception of authorship evolved as authors came to be figured as sacred figures, holders of legal ownership of texts and words, which in turn conveyed "privilege...
Sexual Salvation in Lawrence - October 05, 2006
In his fascinating Erotic Faith, Robert M Polhemus argues that the vulgarity of D. H. Lawrence's novels aimed at a kind of sexual redemption. Lawrence believed that modernity "has brought the deadly glorification of abstractions on the one hand (nationalism,...
Metaphysical Hamlet - September 28, 2006
Andre Gide wrote: "Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet's character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int...
The Politics of Playing - September 28, 2006
Plays might be promoted as a kind of opiate of the masses: Mass entertainment that keeps them from more violent entertainments like rioting and pillaging. This could be problematic, if the entertainments were too heady for most people to follow....
Shakespeare regulated - September 28, 2006
How regulated was Shakespeare's own theater? And for what reasons? Patterson highlights various reasons for closing or permitting theaters: audience composition, including the fear that a large collection of workers might be distruptive; public health; economic concerns; religious and moral...
American Shakespeare - September 28, 2006
Shakespeare's fortunes in the US were, understandably, different from in England. Initially, Shakespeare was America's most popular playwright, appealing to a wide sector of the American populace. Patterson notes that "by the end of the nineteenth century 'Shakespeare' had become...
Popular Shakespeare - September 28, 2006
Annabel Patterson notes (Shakespeare and the Popular Voice) that contemporary critics, whatever their own political outlook, assume that Shakespeare was an advocate of Elizabethan hierarchy. This view, however, is a product of the 19th century. Dryden, Johnson, and others criticize...
Courtly Shakespeare, IV - September 28, 2006
By the 18th century, acting styles also invested Shakespeare with "courtly" virtues of control, dignity, stateliness. Dobson writes, "Shakespearian acting . . . in the decades following Betterton's death in 1710, seems to have settled into a grandiloquent vein of...
Courtly Shakespeare, III - September 28, 2006
Dobson again: "after Charles II's death in 1685 England would never again have another monarch with such an informed interest in the drama (or, mercifully, such a lascivious one), and deprived of royal patronage and protection the playhouses came under...
Courtly Shakespeare, II - September 28, 2006
To one of his servant, Shakespeare's Macbeth says, "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!" Davenant's says, "Now, Friend, what means thy change of Countenance?" And for the wonderful surging lines in Macbeth 2.2.58-61 (including "the multitudinous seas incarnadine"),...
Courtly Shakespeare - September 28, 2006
Michael Dobson notes (Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History) that the restoration of drama in 1660 was not really a restoration but a re-creation, involving "a transformation of the London theatre, carried out by royal warrant" tht "forever altered the relationship...
Bowdlerized Shakespeare - September 26, 2006
In the Edinburgh Review notice regarding the publication of Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (1821-22), Francis Jeffrey, Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, praised the edition for meeting the needs of decent people everywhere: "Now it is quite undeniable, that there...
Barbarous Shakespeare - September 25, 2006
A couple of weeks ago, I quoted Frederick the Great's judgment that Shakespeare's plays were fit only for "savages of Canada," what with their "jumble of lowliness and grandeur, of buffoonery and tragedy," their sins "against all the rules of...
Shakespeare and Bible - August 26, 2006
Steven Marx's Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford, 2000), purports to be the "first book to explore the pattern and significance" of Shakespeare's biblical allusions. Perhaps. The results are mixed. Each chapter of Marx's book attempts to show structural, plot, and...
Ubiquitous Shakespeare - August 26, 2006
Exploring Lake Superior in 1840, one Charles W Penny wrote, "We read the Bible I dare say much more than we would have done had we been in Detroit. Shakespeare was duly honoured, as he is every day when we...
Protestant Poetics - August 21, 2006
In the aforementioned article, Rosendale points to Philip Sidney as one who "translated the logic of sacramental representation to the worldly sphere of the literary. His Defense of Poesy posits a particularly close relationship between figurality and truth, and positions...
Hamlet the Recusant - August 21, 2006
Those who search for alternative authors for the plays of Shakespeare invariably offer alternative interpretations of the plays. Oxfordians scour the plays and sonnets for veiled allusions to the life of Edward de Vere. Well, as they say, two can...
Shakespeare the Catholic? - August 21, 2006
There has been recent discussion concerning the possibility that Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic. The evidence is circumstantial, but intriguing. John Freeman's contribution to Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (Fordham, 2003), summarizes the evidence. One...
Motivated malignancy - August 09, 2006
In his recent book, Honor: A History, James Bowman suggests that Iago was motivated by concerns of honor. He elevates "good name" above riches, and his stated motive for hating Othello is his suspicion that the Moor slept with his...
Updike's Terrorist - June 29, 2006
James Wood is always illuminating, but never more so than when he's giving a book a sharply negative review, as he does with Updike's recent Terrorist (reviewed in TNR July 3). My favorite line: "When Ahmad [the terrorist of the...
Disguise - June 28, 2006
Louis Dupre writes, "Shakespeare's comedies, the accomplished masterpieces of this playful oscillation [between appearance and reality], leave the viewer utterly confused about what must count as real and what as illusion. The theatre here parodies a real-life fear of deception...
The Dancing Dead - May 27, 2006
A Swiss visitor to London in 1599 saw a performance of Julius Caesar, and wrote: "On September 21st after lunch, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed...
Bloom and Jesus - May 02, 2006
James Wood has his fun with Harold Bloom in his TNR review of Bloom's recent Jesus and Yahweh. Wood offers this parody of a typical Bloomian sentence: "Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and even...
Prime mover - April 25, 2006
Dante understood Aquinas: The prime mover is not pushy; He/it is not the first domino that knocks down all the others. He is Beautiful and Beauty in Himself, Glorious and Triune Glory, and by His beauty He arouses desire, which...
Waugh and Clausewitz - April 12, 2006
There is a wonderful scene in Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender where the English Gen. Ritchie-Hooke attacks a German garrison in broad daylight, virtually alone. The Germans are left scratching their heads: "The single-handed attack on a fortified position by a...
Garber on Merchant - March 29, 2006
Marjorie Garber has, as usual, some insightful things to say about Merchant of Venice: 1) She describes the play as "Shakespeare's great play about difference," pointing to the apparent stark contrasts of Christian and Jew, Venice and Belmont, male and...
Biblical echoes in Merchant of Venice - March 29, 2006
A.R. Braunmuller offers some suggestive comments in his introduction to the Merchant of Venice in the Pelican Shakespeare. Having summarized Portia's speech (which he suggests might be a "setup that turns on a technicality" that "turns back on Shylock a...
Prospero the Magus - March 22, 2006
I am grateful to Ralph Smith for references to Frances Yates' work on Shakespeare's plays. In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: "It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John...
Charles Reznikoff - March 06, 2006
Seamus Cooney, ed. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 445 p. I had not heard of Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) when I picked up this volume, but his poetry is a find. Born to Russian Jews...
Final Word on Hamlet - February 28, 2006
That is to say, my final word, for a while. INTRODUCTION Throughout the term, we have looked at a variety of different angles on Hamlet. We have seen Hamlet through the eyes of romantics like Coleridge and Goethe; Freudians like...
Coriolanus and Christ - February 27, 2006
Shakespeare's Coriolanus can be read as dramatizing the Augustinian perspective most recently articulated by Oliver O'Donovan, namely, that "within every political society there occurs, implicitly, an act of worship of divine rule." Through his dramatization of Roman society, Shakespeare points...
Theater of the Absurd - February 23, 2006
In a lecture on Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ian Johnston makes this helpful distinction between existentialist drama and the Theater of the Absurd. "In the Theatre of the Absurd the protagonists are discovered in a world which...
Hamlet again - February 21, 2006
INTRODUCTION It is often said that fourth acts in Shakespeare plays are weak. Action slows down, the principal character is sometimes off stage, and the drama seems to dissipate before the final catastrophe. Act 4 of Macbeth begins with Macbeth's...
Hamlet, 3.4 - February 16, 2006
This scene, like the scene that opens Act 3, shows Hamlet encountering a woman who in his mind has betrayed him. Again, he has been sent for, and probably suspects that it is another setup like the one with Ophelia....
Pierre and Hamlet - February 15, 2006
FO Matthiessen described Melville's Pierre as "an American Hamlet," a novel that attempts to "translate" Shakespeare into 19th-century American life. In part, this is a matter of Melville matching characters and plots: "Lucy's pale innocence fails Pierre as Ophelia's did...
New Criticism and theory - February 15, 2006
At the beginning of his book on Deconstruction, Jonathan Culler notes that critical theory, seen "as an attempt to establish the validity or invalidity of particular interpretive procedures," is profoundly indebted to New Criticism: This movement "not only instilled the...
Thoughts on Beowulf - February 14, 2006
All page numbers are from the Heany translation. The central focus of the first two fights is Heorot, the mead-hall of Hrothgar. The mead-hall is the focus of a complex of imagery. (The last fight has a similar origin, as...
Christianization of Germanic Lit - February 14, 2006
Beowulf reflects the tensions between the Christian culture spreading throughout Northern Europe and the pagan cultures into which it came into conflict. The poem has its place within this clash of civilizations in the first 500 years AD. It is...
Still more on Hamlet - February 14, 2006
SERPENT KING Among other things, Hamlet is a dramatic reflection on philosophical anthropology: What is a man? and What are the conditions of human experience and existence? This is related to the theme we explored a few weeks ago under...
Renaissance Self-Criticism - February 13, 2006
What characterizes the Renaissance sensibility of the self? Two things, perhaps: First: not the playing of roles, but the consciousness of playing roles, the consciousness that creates an ironic distance between role and role-player. Richard II is entirely expressed in...
Shakespeare and Puritans - February 11, 2006
Jeffrey Knapp suggests that, though Shakespeare was probably raised a Catholic, he chose to conform to the established religion but without taking a high profile at church. In a comment that rings true, Knapp suggests that above all Shakespeare "deplored...
More on Hamlet - February 07, 2006
INTRODUCTION As many critics have pointed out, Act 2 of Hamlet focuses on the efforts of both the "mighty opposites" - Hamlet and Claudius - to spy out the intentions and plans of the other. Thus begins the process of...
Actors and poets - February 04, 2006
Derek Jacobi wrote a foreword for a new Oxfordian biography of Edward de Vere, suggesting that de Vere wrote the plays because the plays were written by an actor and de Vere was an actor. Say what? The TLS reviewer...
Dumb show - February 04, 2006
John Dover Wilson puzzles over Hamlet, Act 3, where Claudius is apparently unaffected by the dumb show that re-enacts his murder of Hamlet, Sr. Dover Wilson concludes that Claudius must have been distracted during the dumb show, and missed it....
More on Hamlet - January 31, 2006
ACTIONS A MAN MIGHT PLAY As many critics have noted, Hamlet is a play consumed with the question of action, in all the various permutations of that term. Hamlet opens the play questioning whether he should take the action of...
Empty sarcophagus - January 30, 2006
A famous passage from Melville's Pierre, when he discovers the existence of his previously unknown sister. "Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this...
Melville's Later Years - January 30, 2006
One Edward Bok wrote in 1890, the year before Melville died, that "Mr. Melville is now an old man, but still vigorous. He is an employee of the Customs Revenue Service, and thus still lingers around the atmosphere which permeated...
God's America, America's God - January 30, 2006
Some background notes for a lecture on Melville. It's a simplification, but a revealing one, to say that American literature has been dominated by two themes that at times become one theme: God and America. The earliest American literature is...
Plus choses changent - January 24, 2006
Long before Greenblatt and the New Historicists, Shakespeare had been interpreted as a commentator on the religious or political circumstances of Elizabethan England. Among the interpretations of Hamlet summarized by Ernest Jones in his essay on Oedipus and Hamlet (first...
Hamlet: Act 1 - January 23, 2006
Still more. ACT 1, SCENE 1 Several things about the first scene are worth examining. First, the play begins on a cold and bitter night on the ramparts of Elsinore. The darkness provides a fitting setting for the revelation that...
Hamlet: Texts - January 23, 2006
More notes toward a lecture. Shakespeare's Hamlet exists in three significantly different forms. The earliest published text, the First Quarto or the "Bad Quarto," appeared in 1603. Though recognizably Shakespeare's play, it is different in many significant ways, and scholars...
Hamlet: Sources - January 23, 2006
Some notes toward a lecture on Hamlet. When Shakespeare put the story of Hamlet on stage in the early seventeenth century, the story was already an old one. Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th-century monk, told the story of Amleth, Prince of...
Girardian Dickens - January 23, 2006
Dickens' Tale of Two Cities rings the changes on the Girardian dynamic of mimetic violence. Blood evokes and demands more blood, until an oppressive and disordered ancien regime collapses into chaos. And the only path out of the game of...
AC Bradley's Hamlet - January 18, 2006
AC Bradley's 1904 lectures on Shakespearean tragedy are deservedly regarded as classics of criticism. His analysis of Hamlet is deservedly famous, particularly his discussion of the famed problem of Hamlet's delay. He classifies theories of the delay into several large...
Bardolater - January 18, 2006
Coleridge wrote, "Shakespeare knew the human mind; and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place: if we do not understand him, it is our own fault...
Hamlet in the Modern Mind - January 11, 2006
The following assembles raw material for a lecture on the uses and influence of Hamlet in Western thought over the last two centuries. I was greatly assisted by an essay by Margreta de Grazia, referenced several times in the following...
The Hamlet Question - January 10, 2006
In his history of Russian culture, James Billington notes the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet on modern Russian thought and drama. It was "one of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage," so that "Hamlet became a...
Hamlet in Prufrock - January 05, 2006
The influence of Hamlet, the play and the character, on modern literature is vast. Consider Hamlet as model for Prufrock: Zulfikar Ghose says the "I am not Hamlet" in Eliot's Prufrock may be literal or ironic, but then adds: "the...
Pierre - January 05, 2006
Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) was, to put it mildly, not warmly received by critics. One newspaper headlined its review with "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY" and another reviewer complained that Melville's fancy was diseased. Critics are divided over whether it is a...
Shakespeare and the Law - December 20, 2005
At the climactic moment of reversal in the court scene in Merchant of Venice, Portia tells Shylock: "This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood." "Jot" comes to English through the Greek iota, which is linked to the...
Shield of Aeneas - December 06, 2005
Philip Hardie argues that the shield of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid makes significant use not only of the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles but of ancient allegorizations of Homer's description: "The central feature of ancient exegesis is its...
In defense of Jane - November 21, 2005
Reformed writer Andrew Sandlin is taking on Jane Austen: "I first saw with Jim West the 1995 theatrical permutation of Sense and Sensibility (starring Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson) at its initial release. I disliked it then and deplore it...
Herod's fears - November 17, 2005
In For the Time Being, W. H. Auden described Herod's reaction to the news that "God has been born." If this is true, and if the news gets out, Herod thinks, all is lost; confusion will reign. The passage is...
Lewis as critic - November 17, 2005
Toward the close of Lundin's book, he offers a number of intriguing criticisms of CS Lewis as a literary critic. He claims that while Lewis recognized the corrosive effects of the Enlightenment and Romantic conception of the self in his...
Bunyan, Defoe, and the Novel - November 05, 2005
I want to examine Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Daniel Defoe in the context of the rise of the Western European novel. Some scholars suggest that novel-like writing is evident in the ancient world, in medieval Japan, and medieval Europe. But...
What Makes Poetry Possible - September 14, 2005
In his stimulating Clark Lectures (recently published as Grace and Necessity), Rowan Williams suggests, following David Jones, that there are certain ontological conditions for the possibility of poetry: "the ontology, if we can use that forbidding word here, of a...
Marilynne Robinson - September 13, 2005
Here are a couple of selections from a September 2004 New Yorker interview with Marilynne Robinson: Q. "In your nonfiction collection, 'The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought,' you wrote about the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin, and about his...
Imre Kertesz - September 11, 2005
I recently picked up two short novels by the Hungarian writer, Imre Kertesz, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. I was surprised to discover that the novels - Liquidation and Kaddish for an Unborn Child - both told...
Bellow's Bible - September 05, 2005
James Wood (TLS August 5) explores the Englishness of Saul Bellow, and particularly his indebtedness to the rhythms and sounds of the Authorized Version. Some of his suggestions are quite a stretch ("By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew"...
Hamlet the Calvinist? - August 29, 2005
John Alvis suggests that in Hamlet, Shakespeare alligns himself with Machiavelli at least to the extent that he sees Christianity (or certain forms of Christianity) as a comfort to tyrants. Christians, Machiavelli says, are unresistant to tyranny because they have...
Hamlet and Society - August 29, 2005
Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of "authenticity" and "responsibility," Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet (Shakespeare and Society, 1967). Hamlet's is a society of "reciprocal human definitions," that is to say,...
Tragedy and Time - August 27, 2005
Macbeth hopes that his one act of regicide will stop the flow of time - "if 'twere done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly." But it can't be done when it's done; actions provoke reactions. He...
Shakespeare the historicist - August 24, 2005
J.L. Simmons notes that Shakespeare consistently depicts Rome "as a pagan world in which the characters must perforce operate with no reference beyond the Earthly City." As a result, "all attempts to rise above the restrictions of man and his...
Political Gratitude in Shakespeare's Roman Plays - August 24, 2005
Some discarded fragments from a paper that got too long. As early as Xenophon, ingratitude has seen as a cause of sedition, and during the middle ages the social and political context of feudalism strengthened this link. Xenophon wrote, "And...
Wormwood and Rotten Denmark - August 22, 2005
During the staging of his play before the king, Hamlet mutters the word "Wormwood." Why? Irwin Matus suggests the following: "Rarely glossed in editions of the play, wormwood is accepted as meaning only something bitter, from the taste of the...
Sacral politics in Shakespeare - August 22, 2005
Shakespeare's two tetrologies on English history trace the shift from a sacrally based political order (Richard II) to a "Machiavellian" one (Richard III). That is the sequence of actual history. But the sequence of Shakespeare's composition is different. Shakespeare wrote...
Poetry - August 19, 2005
Poetry is a concentrated excess of language. Concentrated because it always means more than it says. Excessive because it always says more than it needs to say, because in many cases it need not be said at all. Concentration: "The...
The Ring Plot - August 11, 2005
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is organized around caskets, bonds, and rings. Of these, the ring plot is the most baffling. After Portia (disguised as a lawyer) saves Antonio's bacon, she demands that Bassanio hand over a ring as a way...
History of gratitude - August 11, 2005
A history of gratitude remains to be written. That it would be a worthwhile project, providing an important angle of vision into important developments in Western civilization, can be illustrated by a contrast of Oedipus and King Lear. As Catherine...
Antony and Aeneas - July 13, 2005
Shakespeare's Antony is an Aeneas who refuses to act piously by leaving his Dido and moving on to found Rome. Hence, in pursuit of Cleopatra he leaves Empire to Octavius, and Aeneas is split between the two of them. But...
Lot Complex - July 06, 2005
Once he points it out, you see it everywhere. In Lot's Daughters, Robert Polhemus analyzes the Lot Complex, a mirror-image of the Oedipal Complex and nearly as universal in Western cultural imagination. He traces the interpretation of the story of...
Welty - June 01, 2005
My favorite line from Eudora Welty's short story, "Why I live at the P.O.": "Papa-Daddy's Mama's papa and sulks."...
MLA - May 23, 2005
Joseph Epstein writing on the MLA in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard: "At these meetings, in and out the room the women come and go, speaking of fellatio. . . ."...
Garber on Richard III - May 17, 2005
Here are some highlights of Marjorie Garbers essay on Richard III in Shakespeare After All. 1) Garber suggests that Richard is the first fully realized and psychologically conceived characterEin Shakespeares plays. Richards character is fully realize because he is complex,...
Edward Said and The Way We Read Now - April 25, 2005
John Sutherland offers an analysis of the influence of the late Edward Said on film adaptations of English literature (TLS, March 18). Said, for instance, argued in Culture and Imperialism, from a couple of passing references to the Betram family's...
Gilead - April 25, 2005
J.A. Gray has far and away the most perceptive review I've seen of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in the March issue of First Things. Gray attends to the gaps and reticence of the narrator, John Ames, pointing out that Ames never...
Frederick Turner - April 15, 2005
Much of the poetry of Frederick Turner's Paradise is traditionally rhymed and metered, and employs the veiled self-referentiality of earlier generations of poets ("the poet" appears in a number of poems). The themes of the poetry are also very traditional,...
Responsibility and Meaning - April 08, 2005
At one point in Atonement, Briony sends a slightly fictionalized version of part of her story to a magazine. She writes in the style of Virginia Woolf, focusing on light plays on the surfaces of stone and water. The story...
Why We Care - April 08, 2005
With Ian McEwan's recent Saturday getting strong reviews everywhere, I decided I needed to read the only McEwan novel that I possess, the 2001 Atonement. Atonement focuses on the story of the Tallis family. On a sultry day in Surrey...
Eliot and Dante - April 06, 2005
A discarded fragment from a paper: Virtually any passage of Eliot, even the briefest, would serve for hours of source-checking. Let me offer a brief interpretation of the closing lines of Part I of The Waste Land. The whole section...
Shakespeare the Christian - April 02, 2005
A number of recent studies of the Elizabethan stage have emphasized its Christian dimensions. Debora Shuger writes, "if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare's plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously...
Upside-down Popes - March 31, 2005
John Scott offers this rich interpretation of Inferno 19, where Dante comes across a collection of popes and other churchmen stuck upside-down in the rocks of Hell, their feet "licked" with fire: "Instead of turning their desires heavenward, these corrupt...
Why Virgil? - March 30, 2005
Why is it Virgil who leads Dante through Hell and as far as the top of Mount Purgatory? Well, he's a poet for one thing, the greatest poet of all by Dante's reckoning. Plus, for the medievals, he had taken...
Austen and Enlightenment - March 19, 2005
Michael Caines reviews Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment in the March 4 issue of the TLS. Caines provides a nice overview of the debates concerning Austen's political views and alleged social conservatism before turning to Knox-Shaw's particular contribution,...
Sacred and Secular Literature - March 09, 2005
Michael D. Hurley has a fine review of Nicholas Boyle's Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature in the Feb 11 issue of TLS. While Boyle contests the efforts of Herder and Schleiermacher to reduce "Word to word,"...
Achilles and Coriolanus - February 24, 2005
In his study of Shakespeare's use of the heroic tradition of classical antiquity, Hero & Saint, Reuben Brower points out that Coriolanus is modeled on the ancient heroes of Greece and Rome, particularly Achilles: "Perhaps Coriolanus is most like Achilles...
Greenblatt on Will - February 19, 2005
Alastair Fowler has an eviserating review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World in the February 4 issue of the TLS. He finds that Greenblatt, despite his new historicist interest in the historical embeddedness of literature, is rather sloppy with...
Garber on Julius Caesar - February 17, 2005
More from Marjorie Garbers book, this time on Julius Caesar. 1) Though the play is often assigned to high school students, Garber says that the play is one of Shakespeares most subtle and sophisticated,Eexploring such issues as the nature of...
Garber on Coriolanus - February 10, 2005
Some of the highlights of Marjorie Garber's discussion of Coriolanus. 1) With many critics, she emphasizes the emotional immaturity of the title hero: "Volumnia has refused to ever treat her son like a child, sending him out to war at...
Titus Andronicus - February 07, 2005
Notes on Titus Andronicus, drawn from various sources, mainly Robert Miola, Titus Andronicus: Rome and the Family,Ein Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays. 1) Titus Andronicus is sometimes seen as an anomaly among Shakespeares Roman plays in that it is set in...
More on Timon of Athens - February 01, 2005
These thoughts are indebted to an article on Timon by Leo Paul S. de Alvarez in Alvis and West, Shakespeare as Political Thinker (ISI, 2000). 1) The play begins with a collection of Athenian artisans coming onstage, and we are...
Old Comedy and New - January 27, 2005
Russ McDonald has this shrewd comment about the combination of slapstick comedy and satisfied resolution in MSND: "Even as we anticipate a happy ending, we take pleasure in watching shenanigans, pretension, and the well-aimed custard pie. This tension amounts to...
Garber on Midsummer Night's Dream - January 27, 2005
Marjorie Garber on Midsummer Nights Dream. 1) She begins by explaining the various connections between MSND and Romeo & Juliet, suggesting that MSND is a comic version of R&J. In both, an authority figure stands between the lovers; in both...
"Plague All": Timon of Athens - January 25, 2005
INTRODUCTION In style and form, Timon of Athens more resembles a medieval morality play than a Shakespearean tragedy. Timon is mentioned briefly in Plutarchs life of Marc Antony and was the subject of a drama by Lucian, and by Shakespeares...
Thoughts on Midsummer Night's Dream - January 24, 2005
These comments reflect and build upon some private correspondence from James B. Jordan, August 2004. 1) Like many of Shakespeare plays, MSND works on an opposition between city and country, between the civilized world and a natural green worldE(Northrop Frye)....
Notes on Timon of Athens - January 22, 2005
A few notes from JE Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays. 1) Phillips repeatedly points out that the play depicts corruption flowing from the highest reaches of society downward. The Senators and nobility of Athens are deeply...
Girard on Troilus and Cressida - January 20, 2005
Girard has tpyically provocative and stimulating things to say about Troilus & Cressida (in Theater of Envy). 1) He focuses attention on Pandarus as a representative of desire made man.EHis business is to inflame Troilus and Cressida to love, which...
Notes on Troilus and Cressida - January 20, 2005
Scattered notes from Augostino Lombardo, Fragments and scrapsEin Piero Boitani, The European Tragedy of Troilus (Clarendon, 1989). 1) Love seems to be taking hold in the midst of war at the beginning of the play, with Troilus removing his arms...
Garber on Comedy of Errors - January 12, 2005
Marjorie Garber offers many interesting insights into the themes of Shakespeares Comedy of Errors in her recent Shakespeare After All. Here are several of the highlights of her analysis: 1) She points out that, like many of Shakespeares comedies, the...
Marilynne Robinson - January 06, 2005
I had never heard of Marilynne Robinson until I saw a review of her recently published second novel, Gilead, a few months ago in The Atlantic. That review inspired me to get a copy of her first novel, Housekeeping, which...
Joyce "For Dummies" - January 01, 2005
If you are looking for a quickie introduction to Joyce's Ulysses (and, gosh, who isn't?), you might check out this site. Don't neglect to examine the home page, and the exchange of letters regarding the web site's disclaimer....
Milosz - December 17, 2004
The November 2004 issue of First Things had a couple of pieces on Czeslaw Milocz, both emphasizing the religious, Christian ground of his poetry. I was particularly struck by this quotation from an article by Jeremy Driscoll: "To put it...
Greenblatt and the Oxfordians - November 28, 2004
Cristina Nehring's Atlantic review of Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare biography, Will in the World, is sharply critical of Greenblatt's New Historicism: "The 'commitment' of New Historicists is to 'particularity' - or, one might say, to peculiarity. 'Trans-historical' dilemmas like 'to be...
Romanticism and Spain - November 01, 2004
In a review of Joseph von Eichendorff's collected works (TLS, October 1, 2004), Carol Tully points out the fascination of German Romantics for Spain: "For the poets and theoreticians of the Romantic age in German, Spain was somewhere very special...
The Cliches of David Lodge - October 26, 2004
James Wood is never more entertaining than when he intensely dislikes a book, and he intensely dislikes David Lodge's widely reviewed, Author, Author, a fictionalized biography of Henry James. After savaging the opening paragraph of Lodge's novel, he goes on...
Adolescent Humor - October 06, 2004
Greeks are adolescents; Achilles is an overgrown hyper-sensitive hyper-muscled teenager. A student points out that this applies also to humor: Greek humor is adolescent humor. Consider Aristophanes, the only extant Old Comedian. Case closed....
Austen - September 24, 2004
In the spirit of shameless self-promotion Eand what drives web sites like this except shameless self-promotion? EI am happy to announce that my book on Jane Austen, Miniatures and Morals, is now available from Canon Press. For those who don't...
Arthur and Europe - September 13, 2004
I've wondered why the earliest and some of the greatest Arthurian legends were first written down by Frenchmen (Chretien de Troyes, eg). Turns out, the answer is pretty simple. As Richard Barber explains in his The Holy Grail: Imagination and...
Two Cultures? - August 26, 2004
CP Snow famously lamented the division of Western culture into separate worlds of Science and Humanities, to which Vladimir Nabokov (novelist and lepidopterist) replied: "I would have compared myself to a Colossus of Rhodes bestriding the gulf between the thermodynamics...
Hawthorne the Creepy - August 16, 2004
Wilfred McClay reviews two recent biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the August 23 Weekly Standard, and argues for a rehabilitation of Hawthorne's reputation. He gives a superb short summary of Hawthorne's characteristic tone in a brief discussion of the 1837...
Without Blood - August 03, 2004
Alessandro Baricco, Without Blood. Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 97 pages. Without Blood, Alessandro Baricco's fifth book, begins in horror. Four-year-old Nina Roca hides beneath a trap door in an old farmhouse listening...
Let Rome Melt: Antony and Cleopatra - July 30, 2004
INTRODUCTION Antony and Cleopatra is set in the 30s BC, during the period of the Second Triumvirate, which consisted of Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus. It is a story of middle-aged infatuation between the title characters, carried out in the...
Faith and Works in Antony and Cleopatra - July 30, 2004
One Thomas Merriam has a very intriguing article on "Parallel Ironies: Henry VIII (All Is True) and Antony and Cleopatra" (available in full on his web site). He argues that the clown's words to Cleopatra in Act 5 of Shakespeare's...
Beheadings in Antony and Cleopatra - July 30, 2004
In Shakespeare's play, Cleopatra's outburst against Agrippa (who has suggested that Antony marry Octavia, Caesar's sister) is remarkable: "That Herod's head I'll have" (3.3.5-6). "Herod" cannot be used in the same sentence with "head" without evoking the story of John...
Caesar's Reviving Blood - July 29, 2004
Some of the following notes were taken from a longer introduction to Julius Caesar posted on this site some months ago. INTRODUCTION For several generations, Julius Caesar has been a staple of high school English literature, coming from a period...
Coriolanus on Film - July 28, 2004
Paul Nickell's 1951 Westinghouse Studio One production of Coriolanus is fast-paced, well-acted, and, making allowances for technological weaknesses, interesting and fun to watch. It is also very unlike the play that Shakespeare wrote. The play begins with plebs rioting (or...
Coriolanus on Stage - July 28, 2004
The stage history of Coriolanus is as interesting as the play itself. It has provoked riots and demonstrations, and has been used as a way of preventing riots and demonstrations. Here are a few excerpts from RB Parker's excellent introduction...
Double Rome - July 27, 2004
INTRODUCTION For Elizabethans, Rome was not only an ancient power but a very real contemporary power. The plays of Shakespeare that are set in Rome and those derived from Roman models often work in both registers, bringing papal Rome into...
Caesar - July 27, 2004
I wonder: If we take Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as a play about both ancient and Papal Rome, then the point seems to be that ecclesiastical imperialism is unavoidable, that it will take its vengeance and return in more virulent forms....
Midsummer Night's Dream - July 26, 2004
INTRODUCTION Though MSND is set in Athens, there is little in the play that is specifically Greek or Athenian. Theseus is ruling Athens, but he bears little similarity to the Theseus of Plutarch, and he is even anachronistically described as...
Shakespeare and the Greeks: Troilus and Cressida - July 26, 2004
ELIZABETHANS AND GREECE Today, many view ancient Greece, and especially ancient Athens, as the fountainhead of Western civilization. This was not the case for medievals, who knew Greek literature in Latin translations. Though Chaucer set some of his works in...
Boy of Tears: Coriolanus - July 22, 2004
INTRODUCTION Coriolanus is the last of Shakespeare's great tragedies, and has often been criticized as an inferior piece of work. There have been exceptions: T. S. Eliot said that Coriolanus was one Shakespeare's most accomplished artistic successes. And in recent...
Shakespeare and Rome - July 21, 2004
Following is a set of notes for a lecture given at the Biblical Horizons conference, July 21. I will deliver the same lecture as part of a series on Shakespeare's Classical World at the NSA Summer Institute next week. Shakespeare's...
Shakespeare's Two Romes - July 15, 2004
Robert S. Miola's article on Shakespeare's Rome in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays is superb. Here are a couple of excerpts: The spectacle of such bloodshed and death defines Shakespeares ancient Romans as other, as deeply alien and...
Freud and Theory - June 19, 2004
James Woods perceptively notes that the triumph of theory in literary studies is less the triumph of Marx than the triumph of Freud: "One of the decisive changes that theory effected was to introduce the idea that texts do not...
The Original Bobo - June 18, 2004
Writing on Joyce's Ulysses just before the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Declan Kiberd notes the oddity of the ending: "the climax of Ulysses is a meeting between two men, the young poet Stephen Dedalus and the older ad-canvasser Leopold Bloom....
Hamlet - June 15, 2004
Edward Oakes offers a fascinating review of several new books on Shakespeare in the June/July issue of First Things. He gives this summary of the recent argument of Stephen Greenblatt concerning Shakespeare's views on Purgatory: "Shakespeare's choice of Wittenberg as...
Latin Limericks - June 15, 2004
According to the NB column in the May 28 TLS, the first recorded example of a limerick meter and rhyme occurs in a 13th-century prayer: Si vitiorum meorum evacuatio Concupiscentiae et libidinis exterminatio, Caritatis et patientiae, Humilitatis et obedientiae, Omniumque...
French Theory - June 15, 2004
In the May 28 TLS, Peter Brooks reviews Francois Cusset's French Theory, a study of the American reception of post-structuralism after 1966. The review provides a precis of the story, and includes a number of intriguing insights into the process:...
Stoppard - June 10, 2004
Robert Brunstein, the TNR drama critic, offers this comment on Tom Stoppard: "Like Shaw, Stoppard has always been an omnivorous reader and has never been reluctant to share his scholarship with his audiences. If I still can't get as excited...
Cervantes and Christianity - May 21, 2004
Reviewing Edith Grossman's recent translation of Don Quixote for the Weekly Standard, Algis Valiunas notes that Cervantes' parody of chivalry contains within it some veiled assaults on Christianity: "in destroying the fancies of chivalric romance stories, Cervantes simultaneously mounts a...
Dostoevsky - May 11, 2004
The Brothers Karamazov, like many of Dostoevsky's works, is partly an attack on Western rationalism. For Dostoevsky, this rationalism is manifested in the insistent question, Why? Why should a father love a son, or vice versa? Dostoevsky's answer is partly...
Lolita - April 19, 2004
Before Nabokov wrote his scandalous book, one Heinz von Lichberg had published an 18-page story about a middle-age man who falls in love with the daughter of the woman who runs the boarding house where he lives. He has sex,...
Defoe and de Devil - April 19, 2004
A new edition of Daniel Defoe's The Political History of the Devil (hitherto unknown to me) has recently been published, and receives a review in the April 2 issue of the TLS. The book covers not only Satan's involvement in...
Green Knight as Christ Figure? - April 16, 2004
Is the Green Knight in the Sir Gawain poem some kind of divine/Christ figure? Holly (green and red) is an emblem of Christ's life-giving shedding of blood, and the Green Knight carries holly into Arthur's court at the beginning. In...
Melville and the Bible - April 05, 2004
Who else but Melville could have written this line? He advises a sea captain examining a Portuguese for his crew to ask, "His knees, any Belshazzar symptoms there?"...
Marquez - April 04, 2004
Algis Valiunas has little affection for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Columbian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, inventor of "magical realism," and one of the most widely read and best-loved living writers. In a brief review of the first...
Balzac a Marxist? - April 02, 2004
Balzac has often been coopted by leftist critics of capitalism, since he depicts so vividly the corrosive influence that money has on social life, including family life. Several of my students, having read Cousin Bette, point out that Balzac sees...
Longfellow - March 31, 2004
There is something of a Longfellow revival going on recently, with the publication of the Library of America edition of his collected poems a few years ago, the first time a complete collection has been published in some time. Longfellow...
Dickens as Existentialist - March 31, 2004
In one of the great essays on Great Expectations, J. Hillis Miller claims that Pip exemplifies a consistent view expressed in Dickenss hero, which is equally a philosophical view of identity that tends toward existentialism and a closely related view...
Good Poems - March 26, 2004
Dana Gioia has a very sensible and positive review of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems in the April 2004 issue of Poetry. Gioia admits that he at first reacted sniffily at the title and the editor of this anthology, but he...
Milton's Satan - March 09, 2004
A student points out a weakness in Stanley Fish's reader-response treatment of Milton's Satan, the notion that Milton deliberately makes Satan attractive and powerful not because Milton is of the devil's party but because he is trying to run the...
Short Story: The Accidental Ecumenist - March 06, 2004
Sir Reginald Piddleby-Squeak was in a pickle. The pickle he was in was no ordinary pickle, but a pickle of the most unusual size and sourness, a pickle from which he had no prospects of being rapidly extracted. He expected at any moment that he would begin turning green and breaking out in small garlicky lumps.
It all started a week ago Monday, Monday of course being the day when Sir Reginald met at the golf club with his schoolfellows, Sir Allan Pennymain and the Right Rev. Harold Puffmelon. Harold was wearing his clerical collar under a worn wool sweater, and Sir Allan was questioning him closely about his attire.
Why must you wear that holy shirt when were on the golf course? Does the Archbishop forbid you to remove it?E
Essay: Introduction to Julius Caesar - March 06, 2004
Elizabethans viewed Rome through two historical lenses. On the one hand, Rome was for Elizabethans the great civilization of antiquity. They knew less of Greece than we do, and almost nothing of ancient Egypt or Babylon, much less China. When they traced their cultural genealogy, they traced it back to Rome rather than Athens. As Dartmouth scholar Peter Saccio has pointed out, Rome was more than a historical artefact for Englishmen. Ancient Roman history provided examples of morality and immorality, illustrations of honor and dishonor, parables of political triumphs and political catastrophes. Learning about Rome was part of an educated Elizabethan's moral and political education. It is no accident that American descendants of Elizabethans studded Washington, D.C., with Roman architecture, nor that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay adopted the Latin pen name Publius when they wrote the Federalist Papers.
Merchant of Veniceas Allegory - March 06, 2004
Watching the closing courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, I was struck by how allegorical it is. First, there's Antonio, threatened with death for a debt that really was incurred by Bassanio. Second, he's threatened by a Jew. Third,...
Walter Scott, Again - March 04, 2004
Further reflection on Scott: His anti-romanticism, as I suggested, is a common theme in early novel-writing. Defoe furnishes another example. Robinson Crusoe is warned by his father against running off to sea and seeking adventure, but Robin is unwilling to...
Walter Scott - March 03, 2004
Scott is the romantic's romantic, and yet his novels display the struggle against romance that is common in early novel-writing (Don Quixote; Northanger Abbey). Edward Waverley, the "hero" of the first of Scott's novels, goes through various adventures with the...
Deep Tragedy - March 03, 2004
As I've thought more about the issues of comedy and tragedy, it has become clear that Christianity not only brings "deep comedy," but also produces a deepening of tragic sensibility. In one sense, Christianity is utterly opposed to tragedy and...
Shakespeare's Malvolio - March 02, 2004
Malvolio, the steward of Olivia's house in Twelfth Night, has been a problematic figure for many readers and critics. Charles Lamb, who with his wife wrote a book of narrative versions of the plays, saw Malvolio as a tragic figure:...
Eugene Vinaver on Romance Literature - February 25, 2004
From Eugene Vinaver, on the development of Romance literature in the high middle ages:In the third quarter of the twelfth century, some ten or fifteen years after the disaster of the Second Crusade, a remarkable event occurred on the European...
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - February 23, 2004
Odd how things come in clumps. Prior to last evening, I had never even heard of the popular Victorian novelist and historian Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I first came across his name in an intriguing TLS article by Oswyn Murray, who claimed...
Shakespeare's Catholicism? - February 16, 2004
Peter Dickson reviews Michael Wood's BBC film In Search of Shakespeare in the Feb 16 edition of The Weekly Standard. He points out why many scholars are not convinced by Wood's claim that Shakespeare was a Catholic He admits that...
The Pleasure of My Company - February 03, 2004
Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company. New York: Hyperion, 2003. 163 pp. In his second novel, Steve Martin (yes, the actor) tells the story of the "redemption" of Daniel Pecan Cambridge. Daniel is a narcissistic neurotic so frightened of...
Chaucer and Tragedy - January 28, 2004
Henry Ansgar Kelly (pp. 139-140 of Chaucerian Tragedy) makes this important historical comment at the end of his analysis of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: "The selection introduction of Aristotelian criteria of excellent in tragedy has been a source of untold...
The Bible and Other Tragedies - January 28, 2004
In a book written in the late 1370s, the surgeon John Arderne prescribed "the Bible and other tragedies" as remedies. These books were good sources, as Henry Ansgar Kelly explains in summarizing Arderne's point, "for humorous stories of a good...
Kelly on Tragedy - January 21, 2004
Henry Ansgar Kelly's Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993) is a careful and useful study of the use of the word "tragedy" from the ancients through the 14th century. He narrowly focuses on...
Connecticut Yankee - January 15, 2004
Who is being satirized in Twain's Connecticut Yankee? The Yankee or the court? Overtly, the court, for its superstition, ignorance, filthiness, and so on. But Hank Morgan comes off as equally insular and parochial, and far more of a snob....
Michel on Tragedy - January 14, 2004
Laurence Michel, exploring the "Possibility of a Christian Tragedy," suggests that the creation account of Genesis opens the possibility for a "tragic sense of life." How? "To have a world imitative of the simple perfection of God one must have...
Niebuhr on Christianity and Tragedy - January 14, 2004
In a chapter in Beyond Tragedy, Reinhold Niebuhr considers the relationship between Christianity and tragedy. He denies that Christianity is tragic: "The cross is not tragic but the resolution of tragedy." In the course of his discussion he makes several...
Weil on Tragedy - January 14, 2004
Simone Weil offered one of the most thorough-going Christian defenses of tragedy, though that defense comes at considerable cost to her orthodoxy. As Katherine Brueck points out in her study of Weil's theory (The Redemption of Tragedy), Weil recognized that...
Further Thoughts from Steiner - January 07, 2004
Further thoughts from Steiner, and also inspired by Steiner: 1) The dilemma of tragic drama in the modern world, he claims, was that the two main "ideologies" available (at the time of writing, 1961) are Marxism and Christianity, both of...
Ibsen - January 07, 2004
Ibsen, Steiner argues, did not write tragedies. Ibsen wrote "dramatic rhetoric" calling society to reform. For real tragedy, there is no such "solution" to be found, there is no remedy, except destructive sacrifice and perhaps a deus ex machina. From...
More Quotations from Steiner - January 07, 2004
Some more quotations from Steiner's Death of Tragedy: "We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama. . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a...
European Drama - January 06, 2004
Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former "closed" and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a...
Shakespearean Difference - January 06, 2004
George Steiner in his Death of Tragedy describes the "Shakespearean difference" as mainly due to Shakespeare's avoidance of fascination with Hellenic models: "The neo-classic view [which rigidified Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy] expresses a growing perception of the miracle of Greek...
Wood's Book Against God - December 20, 2003
Speaking of James Wood, there's a devastating review of his novel, The Book Against God in the December issue of First Things. Dermot Quinn is underimpressed with Wood's "painterly" writing style, and pans the supposed depths of the issues that...
Antique and Modern Comedy - December 19, 2003
James Wood has an intriguing and self-revealing review of new translations of Leon Battista Alberti's Momus and Erasmus's The Praise of Folly in the December 22 issue of The New Republic. He begins with a contrast between antique comedy, which...
Parker's Back - December 13, 2003
Doug Jones read Flannery O'Connor's story, "Parker's Back" at our weekly disputatio today. What a wonderful story! It includes a burning bush and theophany; a baptismal vigil that ends with the main character, O.E. Parker, bearing a tattooed picture of...
Spenserian Humor - December 09, 2003
A touch of Spenserian humor: Spenser has a witch create a false Florimell (Book 3) for her slothful and unattractive son, who is smitten with the beauty of the real Florimell. The witch uses materials from Petrarchan love sonnets to...
Spenser and Milbank - December 09, 2003
Spenser might provide a Milbankian response to Milbank's endorsement of homosexual sex and "threesomes." In Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's heroine is Britomart, the lady knight who represents a militant chastity directed toward marital and sexual consummation rather...
Hero and Eros - December 09, 2003
William Allan Oram in a book on Spenser writes that "one of the fruitful false etymologies of the Renaissance was the derivation of HERO from EROS: by this understanding, love does not hinder noble deeds but spurs them on."...
Shakespeare for Readers - December 09, 2003
Also in the November 7 TLS (belatedly on my desk) is a review of Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in which Erne challenges the popularly accepted notion that Shakespeare was writing for viewers rather than readers. He shows that...
Missionary Dramatists - December 09, 2003
A review of Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe in the November 7 TLS begins with the comment that Elizabethan dramatists approached their work with a missionary aim: "Countering the fears of religious commentators who believed acting to be nothing more than...
J. M. Coetzee - December 09, 2003
An interesting summary of the work of Nobel-prize winner J.M. Coetzee in the December 8 issue of The Weekly Standard. The reviewer, Michael Kochin, suggests that Coetzee, who is both an academic critic and a novelist, poses unique challenges to...
Arthur Miller on Tragedy - December 03, 2003
Exum quotes Arthur Miller on tragedy, and Miller I think gets things quite right: "It matters not at all whether a hero falls from a great height or a small one, whether he is highly conscious or only dimly aware...
Sir Gawain and Courtly Love - December 01, 2003
Another student on Sir Gawain suggests that it represents a sort of Platonized protest against courtly love. Gawain lies passively in bed while the woman tries to seduce him, yielding only a chaste kiss. And his great fault was his...
Sir Gawain's Three Temptations - December 01, 2003
Another student suggests that the three temptations at the center of Sir Gawain show that Gawain is a Christ figure, tempted in bed as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. Perhaps the analogies could be pressed, but it looks doubtful....
Sir Gawain and the Green Girdle - December 01, 2003
A student paper on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight suggests that in accepting the green girdle from the lady of the castle, Sir Gawain is changing his "lady" from the Virgin Mary to the green lady. That works at...
Byatt - November 14, 2003
There's a pretty devastating review of A.S. Byatt's latest novel in the current issue of The New Republic. I've not kept pace with Byatt since I read Possession years ago, but I remember being impressed with Byatt's erudition and range...
Modernity - November 05, 2003
To what extent is modernity merely a recovery of the tragic? Tragedy, to my knowledge, simply didn't exist in the medieval world. Drama revived late in the medieval period, but tragedy was reintroduced by the Renaissance. In Shakespeare, the tragic...
Sigurd's New Order - October 31, 2003
Perhaps Sigurd, like Orestes, marks the beginning of a new order. Before Sigurd, the only absolute loyalties in the world of the Volsungs were family loyalties, loyalties of blood. Signy has no loyalty to her husband and encourages Sigmund to...
Sigurd and the Dragon - October 31, 2003
In the introduction to his translation of the Volsung Saga, Jesse Byock points out that the scene of Sigurd slaying the dragon was employed on numerous churches throughout Scandinavian countries. The Christological dimensions of a dragon-slayer are obvious, but there...
Ragnarok - October 16, 2003
In his brief story, "Ragnarok," Borges tells a dream of an election taking place in the School of Philosophy and Letters that was interrupted by the coming of the gods. His description of the gods is wonderful: "A voice shouted...
My Life as a Fake - September 29, 2003
In the September 29 issue of the Weekly Standard, Sam Munson reviews Peter Carey's novel, My Life As a Fake, a fictionalized account of a famous Australian literary hoax. As Munson summarizes the (true) story: "Over a single wet weekend...
Midwinter - September 11, 2003
I read a good bit of Buchan while in Cambridge, and here is a short analysis of one of his best historical novels, Midwinter. Midwinter is an historical novel set in England during the mid-eighteenth century effort of the Jacobite...
Wood on "Hyphenated" America - September 07, 2003
James Wood is always worth reading. His latest review in The New Republic examines the first novel of Monica Ali, entitled Brick Lane. It tells the story of Nazneen, an eighteen-year-old Bangladeshi woman who is taken from her home to...
The Shield of Achilles - September 05, 2003
For several years, I have been assigning W. H. Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles" to my literature students, and they all have to write a paper on it. The poem is very rich, and I continue to learn new...
Shakespeare and Rome - August 17, 2003
Researching for a commentary on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, I came across the intriguing theory that Shakespeare's Roman plays are as concerned about 16th-century Rome as ancient Rome. In Shakespeare's day, of course, Rome was the center of Roman Catholicism, which...
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1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
