Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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It’s a credit to Shakespeare’s genius that he was able to craft one of the greatest plays ever written from such an unbelievable beginning, but it’s also his genius that the opening is the very heart of it all. Despite his protestations, Lear has broken one of the bonds that protects civilization from the lawlessness… Continue reading King Lear and the primal genius of Kenneth Branagh
The British actor and director released his first film, Henry V in 1989, when I was a tender thirteen years old. It passed without notice for me during its theatrical run, but the video rental store, that monument to entertainment, where most families made at least a weekly pilgrimage before the rise of streaming, was… Continue reading How Kenneth Branagh changed a fantasy geek’s life and transformed him into a Shakespeare fanatic
The media wants you to think of the current race as something akin to a prime 2008 Barack Obama battling a beleaguered 2016 Donald Trump. The one is the candidate of all our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The other is completely unhinged, bitter, angry, and unfit. Both are serious cases of projection... “The lady doth… Continue reading The Democrats and the media are still scared shitless of Trump
In this official selection of the Independent Horror Movie Awards, a failed actor tormented by his nagging mother lands a dream audition to play the titular prince Hamlet in Shakespeare’s greatest creation, but all is not as it seems when the actor might be as crazy as the Danish prince himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFxX3GrcoX0 Written and Directed… Continue reading Hamlet: Full Dress Rehearsal
Love can sing to us, sweetly, and we can build an edifice upon it for that special choir, an edifice composed of both the joy we have in our lover and the fears of how it will end, for everything is ultimately “ruin’d” in this world, but in Shakespeare’s, even a single intentionally shortened syllable… Continue reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” and the meaning of love itself
It is a tragedy not of a single individual or even the entire Roman Republic, but one of power, who has it, who wants it, how they get it, and how it ebbs and flows at the whims of the crowd, exercising their free and fickle will to support who they choose at any given… Continue reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the nature of power in the hands of the people
Jaques, As You Like It’s “melancholy fellow,” is not likely to appear on any list of Shakespeare’s greatest characters, nor is his speech on the nature of his melancholy, but we see in him a sort of proto-Hamlet without the need to wound, opinion unrestrained, as he fancies himself said, claims it is better to… Continue reading Shakespeare’s most underrated character and speech, perhaps
It’s difficult to overstate the radical rewiring of humanity and our role in the world that occurred in Shakespeare’s era, fundamentally altering the nature of our relationship with ourselves, others, and reality itself. A rewriting that might be breaking down today... The late, great literary critic and legendary scholar Harold Bloom once claimed that William… Continue reading Shakespeare and the end of humanity as we know it
Few, if any endings are more tragic, but therein lies Shakespeare’s clever trick. To produce such an effect, he hid a tragedy in what is truly a comedy, the comedy of life itself. Everyone knows Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy because any play that ends with two young lovers, the main characters of… Continue reading Romeo and Juliet and the true nature of tragedy and comedy
Shakespeare isn’t a puzzle box to be unlocked or a cipher to be decrypted. He is instead a universe to be explored and in that regard, no one in history has even come close. Ultimately, your opinion is likely based on your opinion on the purpose of art itself. The 400th anniversary of the publication… Continue reading Shakespeare friends and foes, Falstaff, and the idea of art as a mirror to the soul
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 