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 [...]
A good game for historians to play is “Notice what you’re not noticing.” It can be easy to take for granted what survives from the past. Mosaics or monuments, textiles or texts, all represent great expenditure of thought, energy, time, and money. None of them sprang forth fully formed, and they tell us something about commerce [...]
Since the eighteenth century, students of William Shakespeare’s plays and poems have noticed his astute use of legal terminology. In 1780, Edmond Malone, himself a barrister, suggested in his biography of Shakespeare that the Bard had technical legal training. Whether that legal knowledge derived from studying, if not practicing, law, or from his business dealings, especially [...]
Legend has it that Meriwether Lewis stayed at the Lochry Blockhouse on his way to Pittsburgh. From Pittsburgh he traveled to St. Louis, where he and William Clark, leading the Corps of Discovery, embarked upon their epic exploration of the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. Evidence from Lewis’ letters argues against this oral tradition, but just as [...]
“I enclose the ‘Sculptured Scenes from Shakespeare’,” wrote Beverly Hard, “which I hope you will enjoy.” It was 3 May, 1960, and she was writing by hand a thank you note to a friend for inviting her to a luncheon. Her husband, Frederick Hard, was a Shakespearean scholar and president of Scripps College, and she used [...]
