Skip to content

Index: Dossier: Shakespeare in The Fortnightly

Chaos is come again.

Sunday, 30 May 2021

ALAN WALL: ‘It seems to me that Shakespeare had understood early on that order is performative, not static. It must be re-enacted constantly, or it collapses back towards chaos. Order is a dynamic affirmation. Every time we write a poem, or enact a play, or sing a song, we are asserting order.’

Also filed in Commentary on Art and Literature, Wall on Shakespeare | Tagged | Comments (0)

Shakespeare’s dysnarrativia.

Monday, 27 April 2020

Alan Wall: ‘What happens if your dysnarrativia is willed? What kind of language are we looking at if the subject deliberately disconnects from communal usage and expectation, for whatever reason? Hamlet does just this.’

Also filed in Alan Wall Essays, Commentary on Art and Literature | Tagged | Comments (0)

Shakespeare’s ‘Islamic’ poem, part II.

Friday, 25 August 2017

Nigel Wheale: ‘”Let the bird of loudest lay” is a far/near song, no song, which suggests so very much. The absolute concision, the perfection of these lines make any attempt to ‘expand’ or ‘unpick’ them seem infinitely lame; they are, in a real sense, unapproachable…The utter strangeness of Shakespeare’s poem in English literary convention is revealed by comparisons, and connections, with texts from older, more exotic traditions – Indian, Persian, Arabic, Berber Numidian, which have resonances with these verses from the English Midlands, around 1601.’

Also filed in Commentary on Art and Literature, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)

Shakespeare’s ‘Islamic’ poem.

Wednesday, 12 July 2017

Nigel Wheale: ‘Salusbury the dedicatee has rarely been considered or even recalled as a context for understanding ‘the most mysterious poem in English’. What he or his family, his literary and musical acquaintances, might have made of ‘Let the bird of loudest lay’ is beyond recovery. But from a brief review of his biography and family circumstances, we can surely be confident that these were committed readers and writers of poetry, amongst whom Shakespeare’s poem circulated, and we can imagine, stirred interest. ‘

Also filed in Commentary on Art and Literature, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (2)

Writing to Shakespeare.

Sunday, 14 December 2014

Bonnefoy: ‘…you’re standing in a corner of the theatre. It’s cold, and a wind seems to be blowing. You’re talking to several men, young and old. One of them will be Hamlet; another, Ophelia. Do you have an idea to explain to them? No. Hamlet is being written here, at this very moment, in the sentences that come to you, that take you by surprise. It’s virtually an improvisation, over several days divided between your table—I don’t know where—and the stage: a text, certainly, but one you cross out off-the-cuff, as when you understand—for example, at this very instant—that your future Hamlet doesn’t grasp all that well what you’re trying to tell him.’

Also filed in Dossier: Yves Bonnefoy, Film, Television, Video & Theatre, Poetry & Fiction, Poetry and prose in translation, Principal Articles | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Three essays on ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

Monday, 8 December 2014

Hoyt Rogers: ‘The heart of the play—the “heartless” heart—is the final scene of Act IV. Ill-assorted, often omitted, it takes on its full meaning only in retrospect. The House of Capulet is in mourning: the Nurse babbles her sorrow, Juliet’s parents are repentant, and Paris joins them in their laments, flat as his platitudes may sound. The concluding vignette leaves all that behind, looping back to the comic vein of the play’s first half.’

Also filed in Dance & Performance, Film, Television, Video & Theatre | Tagged | Comments (1)

Shakespeare in fragments.

Friday, 12 July 2013

‘And so they dug me up. And so he picks my skull out, having heard me named by our rugged chorister of death here in the graveyard. Like Lazarus brought back from the grave, though in my case left to moulder a little longer. Another of his I’s; another of his eyes. Erasmus says the king has a thousand eyes, and in two years time he’ll be one of The King’s Men. To see him stare like that, right through me (as he sees through every one of us these days). He sees through my inventions, including the one that bears his name. Makes me wish for a moment to be dressed in flesh again, if only to tempt him to a jig, the way we used to, before his melancholy and his antic disposition. And this little indisposition of mine, in the form of my mortal annihilation.’

Also filed in Alan Wall Essays, Poetry & Fiction | Tagged | Comments (0)

A solution to the mystery of Macbeth’s witches.

Saturday, 20 November 2010

W. J. Lawrence: Plague had occasioned the closing of the playhouses in July 1608 and, save for a few days at Christmas, acting was not permitted again till late in November of the following year. One result of this, it would seem, was that Shakespeare, no longer a player and wearied out by his spell of corrosive inaction, retired for good to Stratford-on-Avon, thenceforth only taking occasional trips to town to bring his old associates a new play and to receive from them his dividends as “housekeeper.”

Also filed in Film, Television, Video & Theatre, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)
The Fortnightly Review