English is full of figures of speech popularized by Shakespeare. Some of those terms Shakespeare’s interest in falconry. “Hold onto Lima,” Healy-Rennison commanded, as I tightly pinched the speckle-feathered bird’s jesses, or tethers, under my thumb. “Now she’s ‘under your thumb’,” Healy-Rennison explained with a smile. “Quite literally,” I replied, amused to learn the etymology…
Verses Proposing a New Course: “Shakespeare in Context” You’ll pick a modest count of Shakespeare plays– Say, five. Three weeks to each you’ll dedicate. One context week, one week on text, and next One week to multi-modally create A research paper, podcast, monologue, Or supercut of twenty diff’rent Lears Who curse their sixty daughters’ cruel hearts. Professional and student actors we will hear, In stagings mounted locally. What’s more, We’ll…
Saving this for the next time I teach Shakespeare. All well and good, you say, but my parents are worried about what I’m going to do after I graduate. There, too, Shakespeare can be a model. When he was born, there wasn’t yet a professional theater in London. In other words, his education had prepared him…
By a set of strange coincidences, complicated by the history of Europe’s uneven adaptation of the Gregorian calendar, April 23 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. In June I’ll be playing the villain in the Cabaret Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha (which incorporates…
Elsinore is a game where you play as Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She’s stuck in a time loop, a la Groundhog Day or Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Her goal? To prevent Hamlet, a Shakespearean tragedy so tragic that it borders on ludicrous, from ending tragically…. As Ophelia, you gather information and interact with people…
1) Last night, I’m fairly certain some of the shoggoths I’ve been coughing up had achieved sentience. But today, fewer are chasing me shrieking “Tekeli-li!” 2) Those shoggoths hacked from lungs unspeakable Last night evolved to sentience; yet this noon Their chasing shriek “Tekeli-li!” doth wane.
When I teach Shakespeare, I will from time to time deliver a short speech for my students, but this was my first time performing Shakespeare before a paying audience. As Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I got to share the stage again with my daughter Carolyn as Puck. (She also had a separate speech…
Post-Gazette.com – Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes – whatever their genres, the great authors were always great storytellers. Victorian novelist Charles Dickens (1812-70) belongs in that elite company, and although he wrote little for theater, he had a very high dramatic sense and there have always been those to adapt his wonderful stories for the stage. ‘Oliver…
If meeting three strange ladies in the swamp Seems ample cause for murthering the king To take his crown, turn to page 86. If this seems kind of sketchy, turn to 12. Shakespeare’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure.
“To take a song like Honky Tonk Woman and study it for its literature is fair enough, but if you are going to revere it as literature you are doing a disservice to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who would like it to be revered as a great rock’n’roll song. “That is what I have…
Students in my Shakespeare class will be attending this play. Student actors at Seton Hill University are off on a journey through one of William Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedies, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Not even the writing style of the Bard — sometimes difficult to master for those new to the playwright’s poetic verse…
Sure, Marty McFly Day is interesting and all that, but Oct 25, 2015 marks the 600 year anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the occasion for Henry V’s famous St. Crispin’s Day Speech, which, as Shakespeare rendered it around 1599, ends thus: This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er…
At PPT’s The Diary of Anne Frank.
I’m preparing to teach Shakespeare again this fall. Seton Hill offers the course every other year, so each time it comes around, it feels new. The course will focus on plays, but I do like starting out with a brief unit on the sonnet in order to help my students get accustomed to the language. It occurred…
The image (by Magee and Griffin) is an excerpt from a rough draft; a slightly different version is available as a poster, on mugs and totebags etc., from the National Theatre Shop.
Blog ten-beat lines of verse, like Shakespeare wrote. But lazy bloggers, fill you not your posts With words transpos’d, poetic more to seem. Like this, who speaks? Like Yoda will you sound. Nor stuff your limping lines with pointless words And really wasteful phrases filling space And stretching points so thin across each line In order to fulfill the ten-beat rule. Yet rhymeless…
In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…
Jerz > Writing > Grammar and Syntax > The short version: “based off of” is slang. Use “based on” instead. When I first started noticing the phrase “based off of” in student papers, I thought it was just a careless typo. But I’ve noticed it more and more in online writing and in casual speech. (UPDATE — by 2020, I…
Do the spellings of cough & rough, pony & bologna bug you, too? English evolves organically, without our permission. Words that look similar but are pronounced differently generally came to the language from different sources and/or at different times, by an organic process that is not controlled by people in smoky board rooms. In our day,…
The robots are quickly and surely coming for our jobs, and we’ve comforted ourselves thus far with a palliative that goes something like this: They can’t do our creative work. They won’t do our journalism or make our art or write our poetry. Except that the startup Narrative Science has $6 million to execute its…