In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the supposed literary origins of a popular girls’ name Where does the name Imogen come from? Some name origins are more interesting than others. And the origin of the girls’ name Imogen is more interesting than most.
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’ is one of the most famous songs from a Shakespeare play, although its context – in the late play Cymbeline – is often forgotten, and is not as well-known, perhaps, to begin with. Here’s the text of ‘Fear […]
A short summary of the main facts surrounding Shakespeare’s neglected late play 1. Samuel Johnson wasn’t impressed by Cymbeline. The eighteenth-century critic, poet, and lexicographer dismissed its ‘unresisting imbecility’, while George Bernard Shaw (who liked All’s Well That Ends Well, at least as much as Shaw liked any Shakespeare) called it ‘stagey trash of the […]