Archive for the ‘Shakespeare’ Category

Charles DickensEnglandFamilyShakespeare

April 11, 2020

The Merry Maidens and the Pithy on a Rock Cake

Covid-19 (and my own laziness) has interrupted my travelogue of last September’s UK adventures.  I’d been a week on Islay in Scotland, then drove with my cousins in Somerset to Morvah, Cornwall.  It seems a very long time ago and it has done me good to revisit my journal and remember. Here is installment thirteen:  Read the Rest…

CatsShakespeare

February 19, 2018

Greetings from Wit’s End

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I’ve got a Shakespearean drama going on over here that’s only appreciable to a cat lover. I’ve got this kitten I called Hamlet because Hamlet is one of my favorite characters in literature even though or maybe because he is a load of trouble. So is the kitten. He’s seven months old and still gives  Read the Rest…

CatsShakespeare

January 6, 2018

Update on the Boys of Elsinore

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A couple of feral kittens came to stay with me in September. Let me rephrase that in a more responsible way: I adopted a couple of feral kittens and while in full control of my faculties, brought them into the nice geriatric climate of my home where I live with Artemis, a 13 year old  Read the Rest…

AnglophiliaCharles DickensEnglandFamilyFriendsLiteratureShakespeareTravelWorld War II

July 7, 2016

Finding London

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(This the eleventh in a series that begins with A Night in Steerage.) London is my favorite city in the whole world but I ached on the way to the train station.  I had loved not feeling (completely) like a tourist.  Wendy, Sue and I had gotten on well together and I felt a lot  Read the Rest…

FriendsHolidaysLiteraturePoemsShakespeareSongs

November 1, 2013

A Session of Sweet Silence

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I wanted to go for a walk to see the jack 0′ lanterns and to join the ghouls in the neighborhood last night but I was tired when I finished teaching. So I dumped the last of the Halloween candy on the last few children who rang my door bell, had a Scotch, and went  Read the Rest…

LiteraturePoemsShakespeareSpirituality

September 27, 2013

A Sonnet for Autumn

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It’s That Time Of Year. I loathe that expression. Every time I hear it I want to shriek, “Oh My God, think of something original!” Every day is That Time Of Year. It was probably a fresher phrase–then again, who knows?– when Shakespeare used it to begin this sonnet: That time of year thou may’st  Read the Rest…

HolidaysLiteraturePoemsShakespeare

November 2, 2012

All Souls Day

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Every year on November 2, I create an altar of pictures and memorabilia of family and friends who have died, many of whom I wrote about in my book, 99 Girdles on the Wall:My parents, my Aunt Frances,  Meghan, Dennis, Hazel, John.  I sit at the piano and sing two songs during this week of  Read the Rest…

LiteraturePoemsShakespeare

October 30, 2012

Elizabethan Sudoku

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Let me say up front that a sonnet is nothing to be afraid of.  Sonnets were the Sudoku and the crossword puzzles of their day, that is to say, of the late 16th century.  People enjoyed writing them and figuring them out at whatever level they were capable. If sonnets were featured in the New  Read the Rest…

Shakespeare

October 18, 2012

My Revels Now Are Ended

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I started the project of reading the works of Shakespeare in late June, 2012, as a whim, really.  I thought one of two things would come of it.  Either I would peter out after a half dozen plays or I would take years to get through them all.  I was not prepared to become so  Read the Rest…

Shakespeare

October 14, 2012

The Tempest

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The Tempest is Shakespeare’s final play.  He’d written the histories, the comedies and the tragedies.  Then he wrote four romances–more what we would call fantasies—that slowly warmed up to this farewell to the stage and no doubt to the life he’d led in London.  Like a lot of us have discovered in our later years,  Read the Rest…