By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child’: so begins perhaps the most celebrated and moving speech in all of King John, which is not exactly a Shakespeare play that’s replete with celebrated speeches. The play lurks somewhere in the attic of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, out of sight, gathering cobwebs, as if best forgotten.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’ is a line from one of Brutus’ most famous speeches in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This speech is worthy of closer analysis for a number of reasons; it actually relates to the locality around the Globe Theatre, where Julius Caesar was first performed in 1599, so although the play takes us back to ancient Rome, there is a curious geographical origin to Brutus’ talk of a ‘tide in the affairs of men’ which is ‘taken at the flood’. But we’ll come to that later …
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth’ is one of a number of famous speeches made by Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The speech, which occurs in Act 3 Scene 1, is essentially a soliloquy since Mark Antony is alone on stage – the only other ‘person’ with him is the body of the assassinated Julius Caesar.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Lady Macbeth’s speech beginning ‘We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail’ comes at the end of Act 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Lady Macbeth’s words come just after she has taunted her husband for his perceived lack of manliness, because he is now vacillating and having second thoughts about their plan to kill Duncan so Macbeth can seize the crown of Scotland for himself. We have analysed the earlier exchange between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ is an essay by T. S. Eliot; it began life as an address Eliot gave to the Shakespeare Association on 18 March 1927 before being published on 22 September of that year. Although it is Eliot’s poetry that has endured, and his reputation as a perceptive and provocative critic has dwindled slightly since the 1920s, this short essay demonstrates the precise qualities that made Eliot such an original and valuable thinker.