Posts Tagged ‘Shakespeare’
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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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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Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety; other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. — Antony and Cleopatra Act II. Scene II. On this day, in 30 […]
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The word theme comes from the Ancient Greek word théma, which means “proposition or thesis.” This definition essentially holds true to this very day. Theme is thesis. Theme is meaning. In literature theme is the meaning to which the lines of a poem or the events of a story add up. For instance, the theme […]
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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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“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]
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“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner.” — Eudora Welty In 1947, at the University of Mississippi, William Faulkner — an extraordinarily inconsistent and difficult writer whose work is almost invariably frustrating, and yet a writer whom you cannot ever quite dismiss (the following […]
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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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Poetry is a subset of literature, the art form of language, but it also legitimately belongs to another art: music. Poetry is rhyme and rhythm. It is cadence and count, meter and metric. Poetry is prosody. It is scansion. It is versification. And those are the elements of poetry that make it a part of […]
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In the previous post, I said that to create convincing characters, the writer must first understand what motivates the people she or he is creating. This means that the writer must understand what moves the actions of his or her characters. The term “actions” in this context refers to plot — though it bears repeating […]
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Characterization is a presentation of the personality of the people who populate a story. Characterization is primarily a depiction of motivation and motive. The reader must understand what makes the characters act in the way that those characters do. It’s been said that one of the truest tests of good literature is when you can […]
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The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life. Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature. They rowed her in across the rolling foam — The cruel, crawling foam — to her grave beside the sea. Wrote the English […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011