How to Think Like Shakespeare

In honor of the birthday (and death date, we think) of the greatest writer in the English language, today, April 23rd, is Talk Like Shakespeare Day. In cities from Chicago to London "all citizens are encouraged to express themselves through the incorporation of Shakespearean language and dialect ... Read More

What do Shakespeare and the IRS have in common? The month of April. It is believed that Shakespeare was born and also died in April. The IRS is an institution that is virtually synonymous with the date April 15. The similarities end there. As Brett Arends pointed out in a recent Smart Money post ... Read More

Early this year a top NASA scientist dubbed Roland Emmerick's disaster epic 2012 "the most scientifically flawed film of all time." No matter, the German director is taking a temporary departure from science fiction and entering the genre of conspiracy theory films.   The storyline of Emmerick's ... Read More

Shakespeare's literary career, which spanned a quarter century roughly between the years 1587 and 1612, came at a time when the English language was at a powerful stage of development. The great fluidity of Early Modern English gave Shakespeare an enormous amount of room to innovate.  In all of ... Read More

When I was a child, I felt a lot closer to Shakespeare than I do as an adult. That I would feel at all close to Shakespeare is clearly absurd, and yet the experience of poring over the texts of plays, understanding very little of what I was reading, and being compelled to go on, was, paradoxically ... Read More

Shakespeare's Henry V is a play full of great motivational speeches and inspiring leadership. Based on actual historical events of the 15th century, the play centers around the climactic Battle of Agincourt, in which King Henry led an army of greatly outnumbered British to victory over the French ... Read More

In the ancient world, Latin became the dominant language through the Roman practice of cultural imperialism. Similarly, the international prominence of Arabic grew during and after the Islamic conquests of 632-732 AD.  It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire during the 19th and ... Read More

As the single most-quoted author in the English language, it should not be much of a surprise that Shakespeare is often misquoted. However, what may surprise you is how some of the best-known lines of Shakespeare are so commonly misunderstood, and misapplied. For instance: O Romeo, Romeo!  ... Read More

Once a year, the best minds in Shakespeare studies from both sides of the Atlantic convene for the Shakespeare Association of America conference. Last weekend, I was present for the 39th annual conference, in Bellevue, Washington, to participate in and report on the proceedings. Here are the top ... Read More

Every years since 1994, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C. presents mock trials, often based on characters from Shakespeare's plays. On April 10 this year, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Samuel Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor presided over a trial involving characters from Oscar Wilde ... Read More

Passive acts, like listening to Mozart, will not make your child smarter. On the other hand, active engagement--learning to play an instrument or processing words--improves mental functioning. For instance, there is a positive relationship between the number of words a child hears every day and IQ ... Read More

Making analogies between contemporary leaders and characters from the Shakespeare canon is sometimes informative, and sometimes wildly misleading. Over the course of the "How to Think Like Shakespeare" series we will be examining a number of these analogies, including which Shakespearean characters ... Read More

In Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, the character Sheldon Flender poses the following existential question: "Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What ... Read More

What's the Big Idea? When CBS’s crime scene drama CSI became the most-watched show on TV in 2002, many other networks developed a crime scene drama of their own. This isn't much different from what happened in Elizabethan times, as certain genres such as histories or bloody revenge tragedies ... Read More

James Shapiro, Carol Gilligan and guest editor Kenji Yoshino--a professor of English, a psychologist, and a law professor, respectively, discuss how plays like Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus speak to our contemporary ideas of love, leadership and revenge.       ... Read More