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 [...]
William Shakespeare’s many facets allow each era to respond to his writings in its own way. In the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Verdi turned Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Othello into tragic operas and transformed The Merry Wives of Windsor into Falstaff, and in the twentieth century, Duke Ellington composed jazz works inspired by Shakespeare. In 1957 Ellington recorded [...]
An often-reproduced painting in a private collection in Brooklyn purports to depict from life, around 1603, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare playing chess. Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, writing in the Winter, 1983, issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, noted that, “The chess portrait is unusual in that . . . its claims to authenticity rely largely on [...]
Our monastery in western Pennsylvania dates to 1846, founded by Benedictine monks from Bavaria. We run a liberal arts college and theological seminary, and our abbey church is also a parish church. Consequently, it is a busy place, and almost every year sees a new building project or repair or renovation of an older building. Since [...]
One of the Gospels to be read for Palm Sunday is Mark 11:1-10. It is a well-known passage, perhaps too well known, recounting Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Usually it serves as a warning about how fickle crowds can be, joyously hailing Jesus as a king foretold by the prophets but within a week angrily calling [...]
With William Shakespeare’s theatre called the Globe, what did he know about maps? More than a century after Shakespeare’s death, Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary defined a map as, “A geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitude.” For Shakespeare, a map was a basic pattern, but it was [...]
