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Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future by James Shapiro

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“Read by almost everyone at school, staged in theaters across the land, and long valued by conservatives as highly as liberals, Shakespeare’s plays remain common ground, one of the few places where Americans can meet and air their disparate views.” This book begins with a discussion of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar not long after the 2016 election. That play, like most of Shakespeare’s plays, is decidedly ambiguous in engaging in moral questions, raising them, and often providing more than one […]

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Guards! Guards by Terry Pratchett

Fires of Eden by Dan Simmons

1599 by James Shapiro

Penses by Blaise Pascal

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Guards! Guards! – 4/5 One of the best titles for a book, and it reminds me a lot of the following old Onion article: So I also feel like many many many people already know this book pretty well. I am not the biggest Discworld fan (I generally like irreverence, but not whimsy and I am not actually a huge British comedy fan, especially where the jokes are built on maximalism), but I did enjoy this one. The book focuses primarily on the city’s defenses, […]

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

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Who wrote Shakespeare? The answer is of course Shakespeare. James Shapiro details the history of the obsession over Shakespeare authorship. This usually falls into some main threads. The weirdos really think Marlowe did it. Then mystics go with Francis Bacon. And finally zealots go with Edward de Vere. It basically comes down to the fact that generally little is known about the person of Shakespeare, and because many people have take small moments of what we do and drawn wild extrapolations of them, the question […]

Very big thanks to andtheIToldYouSos for the heads up that this existed! Had a fun time nerding out.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro

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This was extremely interesting. I am not deluded enough to think that it would be interesting for everyone. If you like historical analysis of notable literary texts, this book will be your jam. Especially if you are into Shakespeare. I have decided that this combination of historical context and literary analysis is something I really like. One of my favorite books of the last several years was Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, which did something similar, except across Austen’s entire career instead of focusing on only […]

I take an odd sort of comfort in knowing that things in America have been just as bad, if not worse, than they are right now.

Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

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The 2016 election: we will eventually be far away from that time, but while we wait to heal we will continue to publish works – everything from tweets to films- about how it shaped our current situation. In 2017, the Delacorte Theater  staged a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park . Shakespeare had been done live in Central Park for years. Julius Caesar had been performed steadily around the world since it debuted in 1599. Caesar has taken on many depictions throughout the […]

“Thou art a boil, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood.”

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro

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The bile, the fire, the vitriol; do we understand now what King Lear meant when he assaulted his eldest daughter with these words? I certainly did not. I took it as an insult, sure, but I did not know the deeper meaning. Recently, I was driving to work and I heard James Shapiro on NPR. He was a guest because, despite the fact that he was promoting his latest title, a lot of people have been making a lot of headway with the statement that […]



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