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Month: December 2020

‘You cruel men of Rome. Knew you not Pompey?’: Julius Caesar and Cancel Culture

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Anyone who writes about more than fashion and food will find themselves looking over their shoulder to catch a glimpse of the thought police, that invisible nimbus of modern-day enforcers of approved ideas. Cancel culture has claimed many scalps in the last few years, but its true intended victims are the rest of us – the far larger number of speakers who realize they may be next, and who curb their speech, and even their thought, in the direction the enforcers desire. Surely Shakespeare can’t have much to say about …

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‘Was ever woman in the humour woo’d?’ Richard III, Princess Diana, and The Crown

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Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne who is currently being portrayed with a sort of rough justice in the Netflix series The Crown, has an easier route to the throne today than did, in the 1470s, Richard III, portrayed likely with less justice, if more flair, in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Certainly both aspirants to the throne faced women problems. Richard had to seduce Lady Anne, widow of Henry VI’s son Edward, who Anne knew Richard had killed. Charles, in the 1970s, had an even harder job – finding …

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‘So hallowed and so gracious is the time.”: Hamlet, Shakespeare, and Christmas

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Merry Christmas! For those of you interested in what Shakespeare had to say about this central Christian holiday, we have a relevant excerpt from his works, but before offering it, it’s worth noting that Christmas was not celebrated in his time as it is now. Easter was the focus of Christians in the English-speaking world, really until the 1840s, and the Christmas we know today, of religious awe and good fellowship, was almost single-handedly the achievement of Charles Dickens, who inspired all of Britain, and the United States and beyond, …

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‘O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep’: Love’s Labor’s Lost and Our School Shutdowns

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While many nations, and some states in the U.S., have reopened their schoolhouse doors, recognizing that the nasty bug at the heart of the pandemic leaves children almost entirely alone, quite a few U.S. schoolhouses remain closed by order of their state governors. The story of a too-strict schoolmaster would seem to be the province of Dickens, but Shakespeare took on that theme in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Here’s Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, at the start of the play, praising three of his courtiers for joining him in an academic …

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‘To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’: Hamlet and our Shutdown Suicides

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Our year of enforced solitude has driven increased rates of depression and mental illness, and it is likely that suicide rates have risen as well, although hard data has not been compiled yet. 2018 is the latest year for which that information is available, and we lost over 48,000 souls in the U.S. to suicide in that year. We’ll know in time what the death toll for 2020 is, but all indications are it will be higher. (Japan, which does compile up-to-date numbers, has seen a rise of over 25% …

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