aglarien-Literature (EN) @[email protected]

I took several Shakespeare courses but they mainly are on the literary studies/performance studies side. Just now I was told that Shakespeare invented 1,700 English words that we still use today. Imagine. 1,700 words. When you talk to your neighbor, like, 10% of the words you say came from a dead dramatist. It's terrifying. It's unthinkable.

For a Pre-seventeenth century world, the continuum between humans and things was more fluid than that of today. Thus, all the analysis of objectification of human beings in medieval and early modern literature (note: KJV Bible was published in early modern period, too) should be examined meticulously: when Shakespeare's Coriolanus was called "thou noble thing", was it objectification? Or merely a metaphoric phrase?

Many scholars believe the hard headed and wise female characters in Shakespeare's plays may come from his own experience with his daughters. For example, his elder daughter Susanna, whose epitaph on the tome said she was "witty", was 13 years old when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet was 13, too. In Romeo and Juliet's primary source, some Italian folktales, Juliet was depicted as a stupid young girl who disobeyed her father, eloped with another young man, then suffered from a much-deserved death. However, Shakespeare's father-daughter relationship in this story was rendered in a different light: Juliet's father was almost a tyrant in commanding her to marry someone that she didn't love; after Juliet died, she was not condemned but pitied. It was her father (and other relatives) who regretted and repented their old ways. Could Shakespeare's love to his daughter compel him to write Romeo and Juliet like this?

Only in recent years did scholars start to explore the influence of Shakespeare's family on his plays. William Shakespeare was a family man. He didn't buy large houses or other lavish luxuries in London, where he worked. He bought a big house and invested his money in Stratford, where his family lived. He's a commuter, frequently returning to his home in Stratford from London with a 15h+ single communing journey to see his family. In fact, most of his plays are proved to be written at home. This may change how we see Shakespeare.

A bit cliche. But the reason why Shakespeare has been so successful over the last four hundred years must partly be that he doesn't judge his own characters. It sounds easy but most of authors can't do this. As authors we more or less have our own favoured characters and ignored ones. That's human nature. Shakespeare have his favorite characters too, surely, but he doesn't judge them, or the other characters in his play. In his play thieves steal, murderers kill, aristocrats strut, servants gossip, yet he doesn't judge any one of them, people just being people. The more you read Shakespeare, the more you realize that he doesn't intend to punish the villainy and reward the good at all. Sometimes his good endings are frustrating; his bad endings are satisfying. Because there are no real good/bad endings in real life. People just live like that.

Upstart Crow S3 is even better than S1 and S2! Though the three Christmas specials are a bit lame, if you asked me. Besides, these Christmas episodes emphasize Shakespeare's status as part of the so-called notorious English national identity. "See, that's how we English do the Christmas". It almost says. That's why they did a Dickens x Shakespeare crossover because Dickens is another jigsaw of this national identity. This identity is not inclusive to audiences abroad and it cannot reflect well Shakespeare's timelessness nor the Renaissance spirit. You do know that in Shakespeare's time Christmas is not a thing, don't you? They made such a contrived effort, just to claim/reclaim Shakespeare as a token of their so-called "Englishness". Urgh. I would feign if I said I liked it.

I binged Upstart Crow s1 and s2 earlier today and laughed so loud at "there's always time for obscure blank verse, or my whole life is a lie."
Also, could someone please tell the audiences that true Marlowe in history was a genius and the whole plagiarism thing in the show was a joke on the contemporary popular conspiracy theories of Shakespeare's originality? I feared a lot of us might left with a very wrong impression on poor Marlowe!

Empson wrote an amazing analysis on Donne's space fantasy. Highly recommend that one. Can you imagine, someone in 1594, longed for space travel? To see "other worlds" on "stars"? That's our John Donne. I love him now more than ever and I should thank Empson for revealing that coded aspiration in his poems.

Although I literally screamed to my friends on the Donne-Jonson relationship, I don't ship them. Not in that sense. Some historical figures were heavily Queer-coded (Marlowe?) and some just weren't. As to Donne-Jonson, I just like their tensions and how you may find friendship in the most unlikely place. Besides, Donne's love to his wife costed him the fame and fortune for over a decade, and Jonson described his first wife "a shrew but honest", aren't those interesting relationships, too?

Ben Jonson is such a complicated figure. He was famously bad-tempered and you may easily imagine him as grumpy too, according to his criticism on some of his greatest contemporary. He accused Shakespeare's language of being with false wits and puns and attacked the Bard in several other perspectives. But three years after Shakespeare died, he wrote, "I loved that man." He said of John Donne, "for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging", but in fact, he and Donne were close friends and apparently admired each other. In his poem "To John Donne", he openly expressed his jealousy to Donne's talents even though as a poet he was far more well-known than Donne at the time. Their friendship always brought a smile on my face. :)

@DeltaDew Yes, I was impressed most by his comment on the happy ending thing at my first reading. However, now having read Shakespeare, Tolkien's grudges on the Bard are so hilarious to me haha

I'm reading Tolkien's "Fairy-stories". Honestly, he is soooooo mean to Shakespeare, I almost laughed my ass out on his comment on Macbeth, "[It] is indeed a work by a playwright who ought...to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art."

Surprisingly, Tolkien's huge "fan base" includes everything from heavy metal enthusiasts to W.H.Auden ...

@lazulipop Goodread

George McDonald, your portable summer night therapist.

My essay be like: ↓

Well I guess the acceptance of Shakespeare's vertical family relationships and other inter-generational relations in China can be a good PhD topic.

"In Shakespeare's romances," remarks Walter Cohen, "the core family relationships are vertical" in distinction from the "horizontal" (fraternal) emphasis of other tragi-comedies from the period.

@DeltaDew Thank you for recommending :)

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, though a bit notoriously old-fashioned and thick, is good. It at least allows the reader to freely pick a poet and read his works with scholarly connotations throughout.