The Tempest: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Freedom

I have the feeling Shakespeare has been shadowing me lately and writing his plays based on things I’m thinking about. You laugh, but think about this. I’ve been reading the Tempest to prepare for discussions with the apprentices. So this morning, I read Act 5, and I come across lines like this: Ariel: If you [...]

A Piece of Work

To prepare for the 2011 conference, may I suggest you read Hamlet and watch at least two versions of it. I like Brannagh, but it has useless and gratuitous and utterly distracting pornographic shots thrown in. Don’t watch it without some means to avert your gaze from their shame, as any gentleman or lady does [...]

What Sayest Thou?

There are few pleasures in life greater than watching someone you mentor grow. Buck Holler joined the CiRCE apprenticeship far beyond any need for me to mentor him, and yet he has embraced my instruction with an eagerness that shows why he hardly needed it. It is my great pleasure to introduce Buck to you [...]

Your theory of writing

People of a more practical bent will sometimes suggest they don’t have a theory. Others argue that theory is a distraction or isn’t important. Those positions (each a caricature in itself) hold a view of theory that arises from a reaction to the overly academic approach we take to writing. The great temptation for any teacher or [...]

Mending Bad Soles

Nothing is more refreshing to my soul than an insightful discussion of a great idea. On September 10 the 2009/10 apprenticeship met for our first conference call and when I left it I felt as if I had enjoyed a spring shower after a long, miserable March. One of the apprentices spoke of the freedom [...]

Small and Precious Jewels

My heart’s hand would comfort the lovers of Russian literature, like myself, who can read one book every third year. How much more swiftly Elizabeth’s fools and scribes touch the Angloliterophiliacs, also like myself, with noble anger, happy shows, and strange mutations – delving beneath the collars and blowing our minds to the heavens. King Lear – [...]

Twelfth Night

January 6th was the last day of the 12 days of Christmas, and last night was, therefore, the twelfth night. In the traditional Christmas calendar, January 6th is Epiphany or Theophany. In fact, for the first few centuries and in some places to this day Epiphany is treated as the more important “Christmas” event.  Epiphany [...]

Nature and Convention and the culture wars

RV Young puts it this way: According to the reigning heterodoxy, absolutely nothing is “for all time”; and works of literature do not bespeak the “soul of the age,” so much as they conceal, even while embodying, its ideological and economic imperatives. Hence the clamor from powerful forces within the academy of the”opening up” or dismantling [...]

Authority and memorizing

Modern thought resides in the realm of fantasy, perhaps nowhere moreso than on the question of authority. The Middle Ages are mocked for their constant appeal to authority, an appeal that Francis Bacon is supposed to have freed the human race from with his Novum Organon, an appeal to use the nascent scientific method of [...]

Shakespeare’s Language and the Evolution of Human Intelligence

I was watching a bit of Brannagh’s Hamlet tonight and luxuriating in the language (some of which I understood) when my dear wife asked me for my opinion. “Do you think the groundlings actually understood what was going on in those plays?” To which I answered yes, but the reasons are probably another blog post. [...]