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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. :)

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 ...

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.

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.

*Name any twentieth century poets and try to find their connection to W.B.Yeats*
*You'll find Yeats was like 99% oblivious of them while the other party at least had read a handful of Yeats' poems*

I'm writing a short essay on the motivation of Athena as the mentor in Odessey and that of Paulina in the Winter's Tale. To me their biggest difference is that as Athena claims she favors for Odysseus for his quick-wit, she mainly gives his son those useful suggestions as a mentor for the sake of Odysseus' dynastic benefits. While in the Winter's Tale, the dynastic desire is depicted as largely unhealthy. Therefore, when Paulina fights for justice and the welfare of people in the court, especially when in defense of the Queen, she speaks against the dynastic desire again and again.

Horace seems to be misquoted like 70% time we saw him on a literary criticism handbook haha, and 90% of these quotes are taken out of context to be misinterpreted. Poor Horace...

I told my professor in Oxford course that I want to write a 1,500-word short essay about how Paulina I in the Winter's Tale similes to Athena in Odessey. He introduced me to like 3 different versions of Odessey translations throughout history...okay guess I now can read them and write about how imaginations of Athena in Odessey in Shakespeare's time differ from that in contemporary times due to translation difference...

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(the book) could be very entertaining if you didn't get spoilers from pop culture centuries ago. Seriously, this one is a masterpiece in weaving plots. It's just that everyone, including every publishers, tend to impudently spoil its whole ending whenever this work is mentioned...All fun is screwed up.

It suddenly occurs to me that even though the suspected infidelity is a recurrent theme in Shakespeare's plays, no women in his plays ever cheat.

I think it's quite interesting that W.B.Yeats insisted to stick to the "rules", for no other reason than he feared the mortality of his poems. "All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt." He loved poetry with all his passionate heart, to the point that he assumed that poetry lines were like stomping hearts. But, he wanted to pour Formalin in the glass vessels containing these hearts, in order to reserve them for future generations...