A Bard’s Eye View

Netflix is currently showing a Ron Howard movie titled A Hillbilly Elegy, based on the novel of the same name that was written by C.D. Vance. The story details Vance’s life story, focusing on his roots in the hill country of Kentucky, and the culture clash he experienced when he was admitted to Yale Law School, underlined by his need to care for his mother after she suffered a drug overdose, even as he pursued his studies. While Americans do what we can to de-emphasize class distinctions as conflicting with …

‘For we are to utter sweet breath’: A Hillbilly Elegy and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Read More »

Toward the end of The Merchant of Venice, Portia, a rich Venetian heiress, is returning on foot to her palatial estate accompanied by her lady in waiting Nerissa. Portia says this: PORTIA: “That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” The simple act of newlyweds Emily Bugg and Billy Lewis cast a similar light in our naughty world, when the couple donated the nonrefundable $5,000 catering deposit they had placed on their …

‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world’: Couple converts wedding banquet to good works Read More »

The latest spate of statue toppling in the U.S. follows in a long line of similar flares of passion, rage, and the obliteration of history across the millennia. Those of us who, in March 2001, looked on as the Taliban, celebrating their takeover of Afghanistan, blew up the ancient Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley, probably thought condescendingly that such a thing could never happen here. Shakespeare, of course, knows better, and he said so in Sonnet 64. (fell means dreadful; down-ras’d means razed): When I have seen by Time’s …

‘Brass eternal slave to mortal rage’: Sonnet 64 and the Toppling of Statues Read More »

Nevada and most of the rest of the country went their separate ways decades ago when it comes to prostitution. And Shakespeare looks at the issue in Measure for Measure in a comic conversation between Escalus, an advisor to the Duke of Vienna, and Pompey, who is a pimp.  Shakespeare devotes the entire play to the question of how a society that has become sexually decadent can reform itself. Naturally, he chooses Vienna as the setting. What is it about Vienna? It was Freud’s city as well, after all, where …

‘But the law will not allow it’: Escalus and Pompey the Bawd debate prostitution in Measure for Measure Read More »