Tag: William Shakespeare

Johann (Jan) Toorop, Stefan George, 1896; George took great pride in the fact that his profile favored that of Dante’s.

4,669 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Stefan George’s Dead Poets Society

The chapters about Stefan George (1868-1933) and those of his inner circle are the most interesting and even-handed of the book. Unlike Nietzsche, George was not primarily a philosopher, but a poet. His verse, however, was deeply influenced by French symbolism, as well as Nietzsche’s muscular ideas that emphasized will, vigor, and a profound dislike of both bourgeois conservatism and egalitarian progressivism. Höfele claims that “the native idiom” of George’s poetry doesn’t translate well. (more…)

4,825 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Andreas Höfele
No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016

The hardest book reviews to write are those that deal with material that I have enjoyed, but cannot recommend. This is the case for Andreas Höfele’s No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Höfele teaches English literature at Munich University, and he has written other books and articles on Elizabethan and Victorian stagecraft, as well as six novels. (more…)

4,334 words

Part 2 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Negro and Language

After the opening matter ate up about 20% of the text, the book begins for real. As it starts to get to the point, the moaning opens up in earnest: (more…)

2,730 words

I know a kind person who has achieved a lot. We first met 40 years ago, although for many years we were not in touch. Then we remade contact, and now I don’t think we’re friends anymore. He found my political incorrectness hard to bear. (more…)

2,353 words

Philippa Jayne Langley (Sally Hawkins) is an office frump  in Edinburgh — and a depressed one. She is passed over for promotion because she isn’t charming enough, which is true. She dresses like she gets her clothes from a bad aunt’s closet, her hair is clipped, and her doleful eyes suggest a mousy wife whose marriage to John (Steve Coogan) is in freefall. Her two sons are obsessed with video games, and her husband openly tells Philippa that he has a mistress. This is not done out of bitterness; for all their marriage’s failings, John and Philippa are honest and rational. They may not be happy, but they are decent in the old English way. (more…)

Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury

4,059 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.^[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)

1,306 words

“I have often thought it might be amusing to write a humorous essay on how to recognise the Dark Ages when you are in them.” — Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)

If personal bankruptcy happens, as they say, slowly and then all at once — is it not unreasonable to expect that poverty of spirit, of community, of nation, and of civilization should follow a similar pattern? (more…)

2,182 words

Hollywood gave Shakespeare fans a Christmas present: a new version of one of the Bard’s most iconic and gripping tragedies. Although the plandemic delayed production by four months or so, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth was released on Apple+ on December 25. According to IMDB, it should hit the theaters on January 14. Variety reported that a sneak preview in September was a hit at the New York Film Festival, which had just cautiously reopened: (more…)

Cracker wannabe Hasan Piker.

2,239 words

In a world where the biggest racial slur is “white,” it seems fruitless to argue whether “cracker” is also a racial slur, since no one who isn’t a liar would deny that it’s a contemptuous term aimed exclusively at white people. Anything white is bad, so “cracker” is even worse.

Then again, we also live in a world that’s one giant gas chamber of gaslighting, where whites not only are the sole race capable of racism since they alone hold institutional power — a power so indomitable that they can hardly even mention being comfortable that they’re white without having their lives destroyed — (more…)

Richard II, the English monarch whose missteps inaugurated the decline of respect for royal authority in Britain.

2,247 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

A “Cony Struggling in the Net”:^[1] The Plantagenets vs. the Plantagenets

 Legendary for its blizzards and blood, the fifteenth-century English conflict known as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) was poetic in name and savage in fighting. Medieval warfare was the most physically brutal form of battle Westerners in their long history have ever fought: huge, murderous fistfights of chaos and close combat in which few were afforded a “clean” death. (more…)

“Let the dice fly high,”^[2] Julius Cæsar Crosses the Rubicon, Adolphe Yvon

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

“A God Who Has Appeared Among Us for the Salvation of Mankind”:^[1] Cæsar vs. Rome (more…)

Kay Nielsen draft of a shipwreck, ca. 1940

6,074 words

It was a dark and soon-to-be stormy night on the Gulf Coast some years ago, when my other half and I sat on our porch chairs, gazing toward the sea. He held a cigarette — a bad (thankfully short-lived) habit he’d picked up during his year-long research sabbatical in Valladolid; paired with his fedora, I’m sure he knew that it lent him a (pretentious) air reminiscent of interwar Europe (more…)