Shakespeare
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Today's contribution is the work of resident Shakespearean Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of Anagrams for Fun and Profit (2005) and The Naked Anagrammatist (2007). William Shakespeare, culture hero and playwright, is so often idolized for the great iconic moments and the big megaphonic speeches that quieter but equally luminous effects may go unnoticed. A…
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This guest entry was contributed by Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of The Wonderful World of Anagrams (New York, 2006). "Just last week, the Washington Post published a pair of articles on "who wrote Shakespeare's plays." The one claimed that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the…
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On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think…
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Yesterday, we dug out our grand old American flag and flew it from the holder that I had improvised after 9/11. We flew it to celebrate two great changes: a) the Democratic triumph in Tuesday's election, which restored a bit of our faith in representative government, and b) the end of the arrogant reign of…
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Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth. It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him. Some of the books have been…
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In a recent post, I casually mentioned that William Shakespeare was not fond of dogs and I offered as evidence the fact that the two villainous sisters in King Lear are called "dog-hearted daughters." Not convincing, says one of my readers. Is that so? Well, let me offer further evidence of dog-heartedness. Shakespeare's first true…
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More outrageous even than "mission accomplished" is the absurd claim that, during 2006, our very own president, George W. Bush, has read fifty-three books. It's a fool's game to try to re-invent the class dunce as an intellectual, but they're trying. There's some incriminating videotape floating around the "internets" in which POTUS, heretofore known to…
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It's not often that there's an intersection of the disparate universes of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such distant areas of experience occasionally overlap. A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group of which I am a member recently wrote about Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) (a very good baseball book), "Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life…
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Reduplicatives, sometimes called "echo words," or "echo phrases" are formulations such as hobnob, pell-mell, herky-jerky, hoity-toity, itsy-bitsy, niminy-piminy. In English, there are two principal classes of reduplicatives. Category one consists of rhymes such as hodge-podge, willy-nilly, helter-skelter, kowtow, harum-scarum, jeepers-creepers, okey-dokey, heebie-jeebie, gang-bang, hocus-pocus (reputed to derive from the words of the Latin mass: hoc…
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Here's the description of a project posted on a literary website by (I'm guessing) a young Shakespeare scholar: "I want to create a comprehensive XML schema for Shakespeare's plays, and then apply the schema in an online prototype. The schema will conform to TEI standards where possible and appropriate, and exceed them where necessary. Creating…