By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘When in the chronicle of wasted time’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s cycle of 154 sonnets. In the sonnet, Shakespeare addresses the Fair Youth, a young fair-haired man, and praises his beauty, arguing that the Youth is more beautiful than anyone who has lived before him.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems in all of Renaissance literature. The poem is often viewed as a love lyric, but can alternatively be interpreted as a poem about the power of poetry to immortalise the human subject of the poem. But in fact, the poem takes in a variety of themes which deserve the critic’s and student’s close attention.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
If Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the old quip has it, has too many quotations in it, his Julius Caesar cannot be far behind. A whole host of now familiar quotations and expressions – many of which now have the ring of traditional proverbs, with others furnishing John Green with his book titles – can be traced back to Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the conspiracy to assassinate the Roman dictator Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of the best-known poems in all of English literature. The poem is often viewed as a love lyric, but can alternatively be interpreted as a poem about the power of poetry to immortalise the human subject of the poem.
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.