David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "shakespeare"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "shakespeare".
Euripides’ Bacchae: Two Boys at Play
The Bacchae has a reputation as Euripides’ greatest play. It’s hard for me to say. Even for a wildly eccentric and subversive playwright like Euripides, it is very odd. It was one of his very last plays, ...
Quantitative Methods in Literary Criticism: Franco Moretti and Brian Vickers
The million-fold increase in computing power over the last few decades has made possible types of quantitative analysis that were previously available only to rulers with access to large amounts of menial but highly precise ...
German Phrase of the Day: eines Echtheitskusses Unangekränkeltheitsdruck
eines Echtheitskusses Unangekränkeltheitsdruck the non-sicklied-o’er pressure of an authenticity-laden kiss (tr. Susan Bernofsky) Robert Walser uses this phrase in his wonderful short story “A Kind of Cleopatra,” available in his collection of Microscripts. According to Bernofsky, Walser’s ...
Keir Elam: Shakespearean Without Taste
J.W. Lever’s Arden edition of Measure for Measure was a great help to me when I was writing that last post, and his, ahem, measured prose made for pleasant reading. Now I’m going to pick on Keir ...
Shakespeare’s Sick, Twisted Measure for Measure
Measure for Measure is a sick and disturbing play. Every change Shakespeare made to the source material, including the shift from tragedy to comedy, made it even more twisted. It’s never a good idea to ...
King Lear, Nihilism, and Mostly Inevitable Hope
I suppose talking about Shakespeare and about King Lear in particular is like talking about the Bible, as far as the conclusiveness of any interpretation goes. But these were a few thoughts I spun out ...
Wilson Knight’s Chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe
G. Wilson Knight was a mid-century critic probably most known for an infamous little essay on Hamlet he wrote in 1930 called “The Embassy of Death” (collected in The Wheel of Fire). The essay ...