Reviews and News:
A dramatic guide to fishing: “For charm, elegance, and sheer ease of reading, few books compare with The Compleat Angler. Only a minority of its millions of readers since the mid-17th century—it has been reprinted more than any book in our language save the Authorized Edition of the Bible.”
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What did theatre-goers eat during performances in Shakespeare’s day? Oysters and nuts.
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Jason K. Duncan reviews two new books on Richard Nixon—one on the man and one on Tricky Dick.
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Revisiting New York’s Yiddish theatre: “As Irving Howe observed in World of Our Fathers, the Yiddish theater could have kept going, ‘only if there had been more time, only if there had been several generations that used Yiddish as their native tongue yet were also at home in Western culture.’ The rush to assimilate destroyed any chance of survival. In the aftermath, what remained were memories and influences—but what memories, and what influences!”
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An appreciation of Booth Tarkington: “As might be expected from someone who makes his living from writing, I was an English major in college. But what always seems to baffle people is when they learn that I only became that person with that job because I stopped going to class. My grades were never good, and I recall recoiling from books that seemed to be the same books everyone else was reading. So I commenced an education that was far afield from anything outlined in any syllabus, one that featured some of the best novels by Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), an author little read today, and who ought to be read more.”
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Shakespeare’s vows and profanities.
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Essay of the Day:
What did Shakespeare and Cervantes share besides dying in the same month and year? They were both literary geniuses, of course, and they both attacked chivalry. Renaissance scholar Paul A. Cantor explains:
“There is solid evidence that in 1612-13 Shakespeare wrote a play called Cardenio (probably in collaboration with John Fletcher). The play has been lost, but the title was recorded in contemporary annals. If Shakespeare did write a Cardenio, it was very likely based on one of the interpolated tales in Don Quixote, one that features an unfortunate lover named Cardenio.
“We can only hope that someday a text of Shakespeare’s Cardenio will be found in a dusty attic somewhere— stranger things have happened. What a thrill it would be to see one genius re-creating the work of another, and to get a concrete sense of Shakespeare’s relation to Cervantes. In the absence of such a find, we can only speculate on the subject. I will argue that Cervantes and Shakespeare did have much in common and that in many respects the two greatest authors of the Renaissance were pursuing the same literary program. They wanted to break free from what they both perceived to be the baleful heritage of the Middle Ages.
“The target Cervantes and Shakespeare attacked was the grandest myth of the Middle Ages: chivalry. It was a noble ideal and at its best it did much to refine an otherwise coarse and brutal world, but it rested on shaky foundations and had many unintended and disastrous consequences. Chivalry was a way of life, a distinctive mode of conducting both war and love. In its purest form, it tried to reconceive war as in the service of love. In literature, the chivalric ideal was embodied in figures such as Sir Lancelot, who, in his noble devotion to Queen Guinevere, always fought on her behalf and in her name.
“Chivalry was an attempt to give a religious dimension to all aspects of life — to saturate the world with Christianity. The famous chivalric romances sought to civilize war, to temper its savagery with Christian notions of mercy. As chivalric romance developed, the Quest for the Holy Grail became one of its dominant motifs, giving a spiritual and deeply Christian goal to the knights’ striving. Chivalry was bound up with courtly love. A knight was supposed to worship his lady from afar and undergo a spiritual discipline, a quasi-religious purification, in his quest to perfect himself for his mistress’s sake. In chivalric romance, the earthly sexual impulses that ordinarily fuel love between man and woman are redirected in a heavenly direction.
“All this sounds very elevated and uplifting to us today. Why did Cervantes and Shakespeare feel a need to criticize the medieval idea of chivalry? By demanding so much of human beings, by holding them to an impossibly high standard of conduct, chivalry lost touch with reality. It threatened to distort the common-sense understanding of down-to-earth human affairs and to unleash the dark side of human nature by pretending that it did not exist. In the Middle Ages, chivalric warfare was linked to the idea of the crusade. War became holy war. The attempt to spiritualize warfare turned it into something more brutal by making it fanatical. Cervantes in Don Quixote and Shakespeare in his English history plays call the crusader ideal into question and show the catastrophic results of mixing religious and military motives — more generally of mixing religion with politics.”
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Image of the Day: “The Starry Paradise”
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Poem: Suji Kwock Kim, “On Nonattachment”
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