Shakespeare & Poe

Rich’s Best Film of the Year for 2019: Parasite (no spoilers)

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-shik are in for some bad business.  

Don’t mistake me for any kind of devoted movie critic. Every year I miss dozens of deserving films, and subject myself to scads of garbage. That said, I do see enough flicks every year that I know from experience that the typical list of Best Picture nominees is a joke.  For example, this year why isn’t Just Mercy not on the Best…

Sunday Sonnet – 12 March 2017

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I’m back from a long break, back to visiting these old friends, Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Perhaps it’s only appropriate we resume where we left off in the Sonnet sequence so many months ago, with this exquisite poem of remembrance and remorse, Sonnet 30. 

Number 30 is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful, an elegiac mourning…

Happy Valentine’s Day from The Bard

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For Valentine’s Day, I’d like to read my favorite love sonnet of all time.   Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Sonnet 116.

This is for Mary.  

116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark Th…

Shakespeare Saturday – 21 January 2017

Today seems apropos for Shakespeare’s great speech about women’s empowerment–or lack thereof. 

It’s easy to cast Lady Macbeth as a supreme villainess, and that’s what so many scholars and directors have done over the centuries.  But think of when Shakespeare wrote the role of Lady Macbeth: women were property, not even allowed to act on stage–a boy had to speak Lady Macbeth’s lines.  But by the…

Thankful for William Shakespeare – Thanksgiving Day 2016

On Tuesday of this week, I was fortunate enough to be able see one the surviving copies of Shakespeare’s ‘First Folio,’ which is on loan at our local museum from the Folger Shakespeare Library.  

Why is this book such a big deal?  Because, without it, eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays might very well have been lost, including such masterpieces as Macbeth, The Tempest, As You Like It, Comedy of…

Sunday Sonnet – 13 November 2016

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Shakespeare’s 26th Sonnet, written to the Fair Youth, is not numbered as one of his greatest, but I like it.  Its central metaphor of a vassal professing homage to his Lord is very medieval and feels very much part of the times—Elizabethan times, that is.  Social class was everything. This sonnet can also seem very…

Happy Election Eve from William Shakespeare!

As seemingly unprecedented and wild as this election season has been in the U.S., the perspective from the long arc of history tells us this has all happened before.  If you don’t believe me, you need go no further than my favorite oracle, William Shakespeare.  Many of his plays were about history and politics, and through his long career of playmaking, he created Kings and Queen, rakes and…

Happy Halloween from William Shakespeare!

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Halloween as we know it today didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time.  Our dark and costumed celebration evolved from many sources, including the Celtic ‘Samhain’ and the ongoing cultural and religious clashes between the pagan practices of the British Isles and the invasion of Christianity.  And so plenty of end-of-harvest…

Sunday Sonnet – 23 October 2016

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In our modern era we love movies, books and sports games that deliver us stunning reversals at the very end. Well, Shakespeare was practicing this over 400 years ago, and his Sonnet 24 is a superb example of that.

Number 24 contains one of the most fully complete metaphors of all of the sonnets: the Poet’s love for the…

Sunday Sonnet – 16 October 2016

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Sonnet 23 is rarely counted among Shakespeare’s greatest, but I’m terribly fond of it for a couple reasons.

Its opening lines allude to Shakespeare’s own profession as an actor, which is tantalizing since we know so little about Shakespeare’s life. I also like this sonnet because it speaks to the power of the written word,…

Sunday Sonnet – 09 October 2016

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Glorious, bawdy, androgynous and controversial, Sonnet # 20 is one of my favorites. The Poet is writing to the Young Man, and in this poem we get some hints of the Young Man’s physical attributes and the kind of sexuality he might’ve exuded: he evokes many qualities of a woman: ‘A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted…

Sunday Sonnet – 02 October 2016

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As the sequence of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets dives into its second section–the love poems to the Young Man–in number 19 we get a taste of Shakespeare’s sense of ‘Time.’ It’s nice to be right (in my own life I’m occasionally right) but here Shakespeare was right now only when he wrote this sonnet, but he’s still right four…

Sunday Sonnet – 25 September 2016

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For today’s reading, I’ve taken a suggestion from my former college Shakespeare professor (thank you, Dr. Sommer) to talk a little bit about the form of the Sonnet. Don’t worry–I’ve tried to keep it simple and very, very basic, even though the sonnet form is crazy intricate. My little chat misses a thousand things, just…

Sunday Sonnet – 18 September 2016

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Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 18, written over 400 years ago, is a miracle. Often quoted, it is regarded by many to be the quintessential love sonnet. Summer and the cycles of seasons are the grand metaphor here, with the Poet comparing his love to the beauty of a summer’s day. But, like a summer’s day, that beauty passes. The…

Sunday Sonnet – 11 September 2016

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What can defeat death? Medicine? Religious faith? Neither of these seem to do the trick for Shakespeare. No, for the Bard, only Art defeats death.

Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence of 154 verses, if read as a whole, reveal a kind of narrative thread. If you follow that thread, number 17 marks the end of the first part. The poet…

Sunday Sonnet – 28 August 2016

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I love Sonnet 15. It marks a turn in Shakespeare’s great sequence of 154 sonnets. The poet turns from trying to convince the Young Man that he needs to father a child in order to preserve his beauty. You see, there’s another way to preserve the Young Man’s beauty: the Poet’s power of verse! On this point the Poet was most…