By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most perennially popular and widely studied plays. Its story of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, whose love for each other is doomed from the start because they belong to rival families in the Italian city of Verona, is one of the most famous love stories in world literature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
If, as the old quip has it, Hamlet is a great play but it has too many quotations in it, a similar charge might be laid against Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. So many lines in the play have become proverbial and are often quoted outside of the context of the play itself.
But what are the most famous quotations from Macbeth, and what do they mean? Let’s look at some of the most important quotations found in this short tragedy.
Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury is among the most famous and iconic speeches in English history. On 9 August 1588, Elizabeth addressed the land forces which had been mobilised at the port of Tilbury in Essex, in preparation for the expected invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is one of the fairy tales for children written by the Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). It was published in the 1888 collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is about a firework which is set to be let off as part of the spectacular wedding celebrations held in honour of a prince and princess, but because he cries and makes himself damp, he doesn’t go off. Instead, he is set off by two boys and his great explosion is witnessed by no one.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Love is obviously a key subject in much classic poetry. But what are the best sensual love poems ever written: those poems which carry an erotic frisson which speaks of desire as well as devotion?
Below, we select and introduce some of the very best sensual love poems which are more than just conventional love poems. They are erotic poems, too, in the true sense of that word: suggesting erotic love, with ‘suggesting’ being the key word. There’s no explicit detail here, but instead the right words invoking the steamy and sensual experience of being in love, and lovemaking itself.