One of my old Classics professors used to say that he never understood why anyone writes novels. He would explain, “If you’re writing a philosophical novel, why not write philosophy, and if you’re writing a historical novel, why not write history?” For him, someone wanting fantasy or adventure had an ample supply with works like Homer’s [...]
In the last year of his life, while worn down by illness, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed two operas and a Requiem Mass. One opera was an esoteric comedy, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), and the other was a serious piece set in ancient Rome, La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus). Mozart (1756-1791) has become [...]
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America that as he traveled through America, “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” adding that he first read “the feudal drama of Henry V” in a log cabin. While what could be called the natural habitat [...]
William Shakespeare wore his king’s livery and paid good money for a coat of arms and the title of Gentleman. Also, he retired to his rural hometown and made sure he was buried inside his parish church. Implications from these basic facts seem clear: a conventional, churchgoing man, a respectable pillar of the community. Yet, for [...]
In 1755 Samuel Johnson published in two stout volumes his Dictionary, one of the first such endeavors for the English language. An erudite curmudgeon, he then turned his attention to the plays of William Shakespeare. By 1765 Johnson had published prefaces and notes to each of the plays appearing in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s comedies, [...]
Ever since the early 1960s and Robert Bolt’s play and film, A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1473-1530) has entered the popular imagination as a menacing villain. Whether portrayed by Orson Welles in 1966 or by John Gielgud in 1988, Bolt’s version of Wolsey was of an elderly and devious man trying to [...]
Alistair Cooke lived from 1908 to 2004, and from the 1930s until his death he was a regular and prominent figure on radio and television both in the United States and in his native Great Britain. Throughout his many writings and broadcasts, Cooke referred to aspects of his life, but he left no thorough volume of [...]
In 1949, Duff Cooper published Sergeant Shakespeare, about the so-called lost years of William Shakespeare. From 1585 to 1592, there is a gap in the record of Shakespeare’s life, and much speculation has gone into filling that gap. More recent efforts have included two entertaining novels by Benet Brandreth, The Spy of Venice and The Assassin [...]
In more ways than one. Cicero has been with me since the days of Ronald Reagan and high school Latin, when Cicero’s prose taught me the basics of constructing a worthwhile sentence. Since then, a bust of Cicero looks down from one of my bookcases, and a shelf there contains books by and about him. A [...]
A Benedictine monk in the United States recently noted what he called a paradox, the large number of people in society who are interested in monasticism but the small number who join monasteries. Moreover, of those few who join, fewer stay. While he could notice this pattern, he could not offer any solutions. This paradox is [...]
