Ceremonies and Time in Shakespeare

Paradoxical Time and Providential History in Shakespeare and Bacon

Few of Shakespeare's tragic characters have had so marty detractors as Richard II, who has been variously dismissed as a capricious tyrant, a self-absorbed poet, and a Protean dramatic forcé whose unpredíctable actions at times threaten the structural integrity of the play. This perception has in turn influenced the interpretation of Bolingbroke as a competent antagonist who brings much-needed ...

Triaging Shakespeare

Dear Ben, I just got the reviews back on my grant proposal for Hamlet, the new play I was telling you about. I applied to the National Institutes of Health in America this time—the RFA said they’re interested in creative new ideas and all that rot but they’re just as conservative as here in England. It wasn’t even discussed! I’ll wager it was those scoundrels Beaumont and Fletcher that sank it....

Shakespeare, Text and Paratext

The early modern dramatic paratext is a rich and varied repository of tributes to patrons and readers, where dramatists negotiated or parodied their attitudes towards dramatic publication and their reliance on the medium of print as a source of income and literary reputation. However, the lack of signed dedications or addresses to the reader in the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays has defl...

Melville / Shakespeare

That Melville's Moby Dick contains nearly measureless references to the reading of Shakespeare is an old story featuring the whaling epic's persistent Shakespearean verbal echoes, the composition and sequencing of scenes, and the construction of Ahab as a tragic hero-villain, his shipmen as "knights and squires" and heroic commoners all caught in a tragic drama of the excesses and shortcomings ...

Shakespeare in the Weimar Republic