When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I was only dimly aware that a revolution was taking place in how Shakespeare’s world and works were understood.

A decade earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had been introduced to Shakespeare’s England through The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), EMW Tillyard’s slim and influential volume. We learned from Tillyard that English Renaissance culture was conservative in nature and defined by rigid hierarchy, a view confirmed by Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida on the importance of everyone knowing his place (“Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows”). Years passed before I registered how desperate Tillyard’s book was, how much it represented a futile effort to bind on to Shakespeare’s England what was fast unravelling in his own. Read more…

Posted via email from Simply Charly’s posterous

Posted via email from Simply Charly’s posterous

Most Shakespeare experts have a lot to say about the conspiracy theorists who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of his own plays – but very little of it is printable, let alone as readable as James Shapiro’s Contested Will. Read more…

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Late in 1959, the world was treated to a weird spectacle. A portly, well-known Englishman appeared on movie screens, showing the audience round a seedy motel. The motel seemed to be in middle America and the Englishman seemed, to some, to be off his trolley. He clearly believed the place’s appeal was enhanced by a murder recently committed there. “You should have seen the blood,” he said, trademark drawl spiced with prurience, “the whole place was, well, it’s too horrible to describe … ” Read more…

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