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.
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.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘To sleep, perchance to dream’ is a famous line in probably the most famous section of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play is chock-full of famous lines – as the old quip has it, it’s a great play but has too many quotations in it – but this particular moment in this long tragedy offers an especially high density of well-known quotations per page.