Library of Essays

Hardy Cook's Review of Janet Adelman Suffocating Mothers

Lori M Culwell:  "The Role of the Clown in Shakespeare's Theatre"

Hardy Cook's Jane Howell's BBC First Tetralogy: Theatrical and Televisual Manipulation

Ian Lancashire's MLA paper.

Hamlet: An Interpretation in the Light of Indian Idea of Kingship by Susheel Kumar Sharma and Vinod Kumar Singh*

JC Markel's essay Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Electronic Facsimile of Shakespeare

LIFELONG LEARNING VIA DIFFERENT RECEPTIVE CHANNELS 2

For the last three centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have been continuously glossed, commented on and annotated. However, there still remain quite a few obscure passages and complex words which continue to puzzle and cause debate as to their precise meanings. One such word is pawn, glossed as a pun in some editions of King Lear, and passed over in silence in other plays where it appears in similar contexts.  This essay proposes an alternative reading of the word in King Lear, King John and The Winter’s Tale. The hypothesis put forward is that Shakespeare was indeed hinting at the various senses of this word and exploiting its punning potential in these three plays. This suggestion is supported by a series of examples of similar rhetorical exploitation of this polysemic word as found in several contemporary authors. These examples will demonstrate that the various senses of the word were indeed very much alive in Elizabethan England –and quite probably in Shakespeare’s mind. 

Cook Unnoticed Variant Reading in Q1 Lucrece, 1594."

LIFELONG LEARNING VIA DIFFERENT RECEPTIVE CHANNELS 3

Shakespeare's Morality 2

Loose Ends and Inconsistencies in the First Quarto of Shakespeare's Hamlet?

History to Myth in R3 more

Harry Hill's "High" and "Low" Culture in Hamlet

Hardy Cook's review od WSC on CDROM

Godshalk, William Leigh. "Twelfth Night: All or Nothing? What You Will, It's All One -- Or Is It?"

William L. Davis. "Shakespeare, [Re]Visionist"

Hardy Cook's Editing and the Electronic Text

Prudence and Kinship of Prince Hal