Posts from the ‘Shakespeare’ Category
The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) did not invent the Petrarchan sonnet, which is also known as the Italian sonnet. It was first used by Dante (1265-1321) and then later by many of Dante’s contemporaries. Petrarch’s excellence with the form, however, especially when celebrating his beloved Laura, made the Italian sonnet more widely known, so that even […]
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On this day (April 23, 1564) was born the greatest poet the world has ever known. The following is a repost from an excellent question I once received: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that? — Slo Readuh Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more. It’s impossible to overstate […]
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Ceasar: The ides of March are come. Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone. — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1. The word ides is derived from the ancient Roman calendar and comes from the Latin idus, which Oxford defines as “a day falling roughly in the middle of each month (the 15th day of March, May, […]
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This is from 2012, but I only just heard of it: PULP SHAKESPEARE, a “Best of Fest” winner at the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Fest, has been selected to be presented in the 2012 FringeNYC Encores Series. Out of the 187 productions in this year’s FringeNYC Festival, PULP SHAKESPEARE is one of just fifteen chosen for […]
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Of the nearly 18,000 written words in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, over 1,700 are seen for the first time in his works. This doesn’t necessarily mean he coined all those words — and in fact many of them most likely existed in other languages, like Latin, for a very long time before Shakespeare anglicized them. New words […]
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This is a famous and often misunderstood line from Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 5), spoken by the unforgettable Lady Macbeth, who says: The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to […]
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Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield. Wrote Charles Dickens. Where does that phrase “heart of hearts” come from? Well, nowhere. It’s a perversion of Shakespeare’s heart of heart, which appears in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2, 71-74): Hamlet: Give me that […]
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William Shakespeare — who’s remarkable for so many things that it’s easy to forget the thing he’s perhaps most remarkable for: the fact that he doesn’t reveal himself in any of his plays — was born in 1564, in Stratford, a tiny village which at that time had a population of approximately 1,500 people. In […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011