Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s New Place

Let me fast-forward two centuries from my last post, fly back across the Atlantic, and transport you to Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon. The redevelopment of New Place commemorating Shakespeare’s death in 2016 offers a test of the extent to which the idea … Continue reading

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Escapes

  My next set of images returns to the problem of what sort of ‘work’ writing is and whether it is actually anti-social.

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Implements

  There is something unsettling and indecorous about thinking about the chair as the ground of writing – something altogether too reminiscent, as Simon Goldhill has put it, of the writer’s buttocks. The paraphernalia of writing which connects hand and … Continue reading

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Chairs

  The case of Burns’ desk suggests that the desk, however authentic, is not always adequate as the imagined ground of writing. Sometimes the chair will take the imaginative weight instead. Here are four ‘writer’s chairs’ that test that hypothesis. … Continue reading

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Shakespeare’s Verona II

From the morbid to the romantic: today we are headed from Juliet’s tomb to Juliet’s house, the site from which those wonderfully poetic declarations of love, so frequently quoted even to this day, were supposedly expressed and received from the … Continue reading

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Shakespeare’s Verona

  Shakespeare’s Verona is a true curiosity for the literary tourist because it is so much the product of wishful thinking. It is extremely unlikely (despite some pleasant speculation) that Shakespeare ever went to Italy; there is certainly no evidence … Continue reading

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Shakespeare’s Garden

In the grounds of Northwestern University, situated in Evanston north of Chicago, there is a smallish formal garden, bounded by high hedges, and furnished with stone seats, a sundial, and a wall-fountain. It is usually deserted; the odd elderly lady, … Continue reading

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Celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday

So here I am again in Stratford-upon-Avon, togged up in my increasingly disreputable DPhil gown from Oxford (this year the blue facings seem not only to have faded to a definite mauve, but to have become weirdly blotchy), carrying a … Continue reading

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