Shakespeare rarely made up his own stories. He frequently adapted historical events from chronicles or fictional tales from various places. He wrote at least eight plays with HISTORY in the title. Every event portrayed in those two tetralogies were over a hundred years old. Consequently, talking about history in a Shakespeare play requires two overlappingContinue reading “Julius Caesar: The Historical Bind”
Tag Archives: Drama
Covenantal Shakespeare
Today, I read Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). The play is all about succession and the relationships between fathers and their children. It made me think that I should focus my interpretive efforts on what I’ll call Covenantal Shakespeare, a survey of Shakespeare’s great tragedies through the themes of the covenant. The syllabus would look thisContinue reading “Covenantal Shakespeare”
Experiments in Criticism 