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 [...]
In her novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar imagined the future Roman emperor Hadrian as a young soldier in the Roman army traveling with a new volume of Plutarch in his rucksack. That novel first appeared in French in 1951 and appeared in English in 1954, and before and since, novelists have imagined their characters reading [...]
In 1958, Michael Grant published a series of lectures under the title Roman History from Coins. Ten years later he issued a revised edition, but both versions explain why studying ancient coins sheds light on ancient history. As one example, he referred to Diocletian’s economic reforms made in the late 200s. “Our literary sources leave so [...]
For thirty summers the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival (now Company) has performed in Harrisburg’s Reservoir Park. On a hill several blocks to the east of Pennsylvania’s capitol building and of the Susquehanna River, the park is an idyllic setting for Shakespeare’s plays, especially his comedies. A notable experiment occurred in 1999, when the troupe produced The Taming [...]
In 1934, Cole Porter, in his song “You’re the Top,” from his hit Broadway show Anything Goes, referred to a Shakespeare sonnet as an example of perfection, and in 1948 he based his musical comedy, Kiss Me, Kate, on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Still, something more important than Shakespeare’s influence on America’s greatest lyric [...]
