The fall harvest is ready, and this year, we’ve got a bumper crop of Shakespeare plays! If you’re in the mood for something spooky, you might enjoy the three productions of Macbeth our theater partners are staging this month, or perhaps the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s The Living Dead. October also features a special anniversary production from… Continue Reading »
“Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties.” Read more from Katherine Rundell in this excerpt from her new biography of the English poet John Donne, “Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne.”
Shakespeare’s plays provide ample opportunity for dramatic deaths onstage, and 18th-century English actors like David Garrick transformed simple stage directions in the text into “stirring set-pieces,” as Laurence Senelick writes in the below excerpt from his new book, “The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage.”
HBO’s Emmy-winning “The White Lotus” transforms Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” into a darkly funny satire of the hospitality industry, writes Austin Tichenor.
“Murphy may be the first person in history to subject laughter to such intensive and extensive study, at least from the perspective of a laughter professional,” writes Joy Wiltenburg about the 18th-century writer’s 500-page compilation of humor, in this excerpt from her book, “Laughing Histories.” Murphy’s commonplace book is part of the Folger collection.
See some of the Folger collection items that Charles and Camilla examined when they visited the Folger in 2005, including an early modern book on plants that got the prince’s attention.
