Love Lessons … and Language in “Love’s Labor’s Lost”
Despite its alliteration, the title of this early Shakespeare comedy does not exactly roll off the tongue. It trips and twists the tongue. Oh so innocently, it would seem, and yet I’m wondering now, having come to the end of the drama, if it’s a kind of trap meant to catch the eye and the mind.
On Coffins, Briefly
What is it about coffins? Boat-like, they suggest travel as much as they do an invitation to repose, with elegant lines and careful carpentry. They might be sealed against invading waters, at least temporarily, and, so enabled, float un-sinking upon such frightful rivers of archetypal memory and the mind as Styx and Acheron, allowing for navigation in the gray borderlands between life and death.
Such Things as Dreams are Made Of, uh …, On
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” spoken by Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” is one of the best-known lines in movies. Only slightly less well known is that one at the end of “The Maltese Falcon” concerning dreams, desire, and the frustrated quest for treasure. Have you considered the source quotation, written centuries earlier, by Shakespeare in “The Tempest”?
Who’s the Bigger Drama Queen, Cleopatra or … Antony?
Whatever else she may or may not be, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, of The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, is a drama queen. To give her her supreme and royal due, we might even call her the drama queen or proto–drama queen, for she has long epitomized the type—even before we knew what to call it. But she’s not the only drama queen here…
Chatbot Shakespeare
Can you identify the play from which the following soliloquy fragment was drawn?
“…Oh, what a tangled web …
Shakespeare’s “No” and the Allure of Denial
“…yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” –Ulysses, James Joyce
In any discussion of the “no,” it seems worthwhile to consider the opposite, as a point of reference.
Coriolanus and the Perils of People Pleasing
Was Coriolanus a “people pleaser?” If you’ve read this one or seen it performed, your first answer might be to say, no. Not by a long shot.
What’s in a Name
“… O, be some other name! / What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet …” —Romeo and Juliet II.ii, 42 (references to Shakespeare’s writing here and throughout are to the text of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974).
“Shakespeare and a Cup of Coffee” is not the name I had first for the title of my blog. It was, rather, “Shakespeare for Breakfast,” which I thought smart, with several suggested obvious meanings. I could eat Shakespeare for breakfast…