Library of Essays

LIFELONG LEARNING VIA DIFFERENT RECEPTIVE CHANNELS 2

LIFELONG LEARNING VIA DIFFERENT RECEPTIVE CHANNELS 3

Literary Computing and Shakespeare's Sonnets

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

Hardy Cook's Valuing the Material Text

Synopsis: In this paper I bring together an array of evidence, much of it new, to show that the satirical author, Thomas Nashe, had a much closer and more vitriolic relationship with Henry Wriothesley and, by extension, William Shakespeare than has previously been realized. The discovery sheds more light on the relationship of the third earl of Southampton with Shakespeare and strengthens the probability of a significant element of biography within Shakespeare's Sonnets.

New-Minting Shakespeare

'Of every nation a traveler': Geographical and Spatial Imagination in Pericles by Monica Matei Chesnoiu

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

Petrarch and Pyramus in the Woods of Athens

Pleasures of Textual

Hardy Cook"s The Politics of an Academic Discussion Group

Prudence and Kinship of Prince Hal

Ian Lancashire's MLA paper.

Public Privates by Al Cacicedo

QUEEN OF THE FIRST QUARTO

Hardy Cook's Refornating HAMLET

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

Would You Believe..."Sergeant Shakespeare"? by Joe Conlon

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.