793
William Shakespeare recalls how the love of his life once teased him to the brink of despair.
This Sonnet is held to be one of William Shakespeare’s earlier works, owing in part to its relatively simple form. However, keen-eyed observers have noted that the husband of Anne Hathaway seems to have buried some tender-hearted little clues in the closing lines.
Picture: © Tony Hisgett, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted January 10 2019
794
Literary rumour in the time of Queen Anne said that William Shakespeare owed his extraordinary career to a scurrilous ballad.
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
Picture: © Tanya Dedyukhina, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted January 9 2019
795
A benevolent lecturer has to persuade a class of restless girls to stay inside on a rainy day.
John Ruskin’s ‘Ethics of the Dust’ is a series of classroom dialogues inspired by the famous art critic’s visits to Winnington Hall, a girls’ school near Northwich in Cheshire, where he taught Scripture, geology and art, and oversaw cricket matches. Pianist Sir Charles Hallé performed for the girls too, and would surely have enjoyed Ruskin’s musical analogy.
Picture: © Aaron Burden, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.. Source.
Posted January 7 2019
796
An Elizabethan mariner reaches Japan under terrible hardships, only to find himself under sentence of death at the hands of his fellow Europeans.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were Elizabeth I’s Protestant allies against Europe’s Catholic states and the cruel Inquisition. This made trade with South America and the Far East, where Spanish and Portuguese merchants were already established, a matter of bitter and bloody rivalry.
Picture: © shikibane taro, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted January 3 2019
797
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.
Picture: © Shobha Elizabeth John, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted December 31 2018
798
Four knights thought they were helping their King, but they could not have made a greater mistake.
Henry II (r. 1154-1189) appointed his friend Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, thinking he would always do as he was told. But Becket proved very independent-minded, and even had to flee to France to escape his King’s anger.
Picture: From Wikimedia Commons.. Source.
Posted December 29 2018