Blogging Shakespeare

You do not expect a critic of Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and other geniuses of human depth and intellect to be as good as Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard. Fair enough. But not when the critic’s name is Ewan Fernie. I had never before heard the author of what I consider to be one of […]

Professor Reg Foakes, who died at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon just before Christmas, was a wise, liberal-minded, influential and much-loved Shakespeare scholar and teacher. His career spanned over sixty years at the universities of Birmingham, Durham, Yale, Toronto, Kent and Los Angeles. He was born and grew up in West Bromwich. His degree at Birmingham […]

Like many others, I am saddened to hear about the death of Shakespeare Scholar, Professor Reg Foakes. Here is a piece written by a Sylvia Morris, cross-posted from her site www.theshakespeareblog.com ‘I’m sitting here with my Arden Edition of King Lear, probably the most authoritative edition of the play ever published. Its editor, Reg Foakes […]

Sonnet 15 When I consider every thing that growes Holds in perfection but a little moment. That this huge stage presenteth nought but showes Whereon the stars in secret influence comment. When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheared and checkt even by the selfe-same skie: Vaunt in their youthfull sap, at height decrease, […]

Sonnet 76 Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quicke change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keepe invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost […]

This is Shakespeare’s most religious sonnet and is not unlike the conceit of John Donne’s ‘Death be not proud’. The poem is damaged and in need of emendation since the 1609 quarto repeats ‘my sinful earth’ at the beginning of the second line. Editors over the centuries have suggested more than eighty alternative readings, among […]

This sonnet could easily be spoken by Antony about Cleopatra and their ‘age in love.’ It doesn’t take long for ‘simple truth’ not only to be suppressed, but changed into a web of lies. The poet pretends to believe his ‘love’ in the hope that she might think him younger than he is.The volta asks […]

Sonnet 136 seems to cry out to be read biographically, ending as it does with the poet’s name: ‘my name is Will’. But the abbreviated form of ‘William’ was a word highly associated with sex and sexual passions, as to some extent it still is. The poet’s name loses its capital letter in line 3 […]

In this single poem Shakespeare turns the entire Petrarchan tradition on its head. Instead of praising an unobtainable beauty in romantic and conventional ways, Shakespeare looks beyond surface appearances to what’s really there in the person he loves. Her eyes are not full of sunlight, neither are her lips the best shade of red; her […]