William Shakespeare
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘William Shakespeare’
William Shakespeare in sombre mood clings to love as the only changeless thing in a world of decay.
Sonnet 116 was published in 1609, when William Shakespeare was forty-five and still working as an actor in London. The capital was ravaged that year by particularly relentless outbreaks of plague, which perhaps helps to explain the sombre tone of his poem about love, the one constant in a world of sickness, age and death.
Rosalind explains to Orlando that Time moves at different paces depending on who you are.
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It is believed to be the play that opened the New Globe theatre in 1599. After Frederick usurped the throne of his brother Duke Senior (so the story goes) he exiled his own daughter Rosalind for disobedience. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind fled to the Forest of Arden only to run into a long-time admirer, Orlando. To hide her confusion, and still incognito, she accosts him ‘like a saucy lackey’.
William Shakespeare immortalised his lover in verse, as if holding back for ever the ravages of Time.
Without question, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 is one of the best known and most beloved poems in the English language. William immortalises his lover in verse, saying that though beauty must pass away all too soon, she and her loveliness will live on in his lines as long as there are men to read them.
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.
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).
The scheming Iago warns Othello against falling victim to jealousy.
Othello, a General in the Venetian army, has promoted Cassio to Lieutenant instead of Iago; in revenge, Iago has hinted at an intrigue between Cassio and Desdemona, Othello’s wife. Othello is beside himself to hear more, but Iago teasingly clams up, as if worried about Cassio’s reputation.