Curious trivia about Shakespeare’s classic play 1. The first known piece of criticism of the play was an entry in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys, who saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed in 1662, recorded in his famous diary that the play was ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that […]
The best poems about summer, selected by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘In a summer season, when soft was the sun’: so begins one of the great long poems of medieval England, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. But many shorter poems have reflected the warm sunshine and sense of happiness that we tend […]
A summary of a classic Matthew Arnold sonnet by Dr Oliver Tearle Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was a Victorian poet and critic whose views on everything from culture to education were hugely influential (Arnold’s day job was an inspector of schools, and he was the son of Thomas Arnold, influential headmaster […]
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 […]
The best of the Bard’s plays, with some interesting facts about them Every Shakespeare play is a classic, of course. But William Shakespeare left behind nearly forty plays, including his collaborations with John Fletcher and others, and it would be disingenuous to claim that they all have equal ‘classic’ status […]