Shakespeare | ZETEO

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, from CNN video clip, 29 September 2017

Puerto Rico, Mayor Cruz, Shakespeare

September 30, 2017 by William Eaton

Speeches of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, in the Company of Consonant Words from Patrick Henry, Karuna Ezara Parikh’, Martin Luther King, Jr., Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shakespeare 29 September 2017, as revised 4 October 2017 San Juan Mayor Cruz’s speeches to cable-news reporters and the world were heroic and heart-rending, and examples of great leadership in a time of crisis. If and when documentaries come to be made of the Trump years, sadly, these clips […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: CNN, death, disaster, Donald Trump, hunger, Martin Luther King, Paris, Patrick Henry, Puerto Rico, Shakespeare, Shelley, speeches

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long exposure photo of lightning strikes; credit, n5mbm.net

Facebook Critical Distance Reading

December 31, 2015 by William Eaton

Happiness courts us in her best array? An old friend, 70, after a perfectly successful career as a curator of nineteenth-century sculpture, has been reborn as a Facebook post-er. So many good posts, often several in a day, sometimes featuring photos she has taken, sometimes bits from the news, the Web. She is French, lives in Paris, and while in past decades I have, from New York, listened to French radio and read Le monde, now, for the first time, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Alcoholics Anonymous, critical distance, Facebook, Frederic Jameson, Holocaust, lightning, postmodernism, Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare

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What might poetry give us?

September 3, 2015 by William Eaton

. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein

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Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, Pearl Theater

Better pleased with madness

March 12, 2015 by William Eaton

A favorite short speech from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. A young prince, in love with a lovely, seeming shepherd girl (see photo above), is warned by his father’s right-hand man to take heed, “be advised.” The young man’s response echoes the human response to life in general. I am advised, he says— by my fancy: if my reason Will thereto be obedient, I have reason; If not, my senses, better pleased with madness, Do bid it welcome. The most unfortunate […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: A Winter's Tale, cultural criticism, flowers, Internet, Shakespeare, theater

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Moliere (one of the films)

December 26, 2014 by William Eaton

Wishing to re-watch Ariane Mnouchkine’s rightly famous film, 1978 film Molière, I accidentally bought a copy of Laurent Tirard’s rather less well known 2007 film: Molière. Months later, a Friday evening, back home from Paris, I put the DVD in the machine and stretched out on my couch, prepared to lose myself in film A, only to find myself watching this alien film B. Which turns out, and notwithstanding some uninspired reviews, to be fabulous, one of the greatest films about acting that […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: acting, Molière, movies, Shakespeare, theater

Reading: 16-22 June 2013 (ZiR)

June 17, 2013 by William Eaton

Patrick Rea, Zeteo Contributor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 16 June 2013 Laertes’ advice from his father Polonius (Shakepeare, “Hamlet”) as it appears in The Art of Manliness: Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame! The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail, And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Middle Ages, New York Public Library, New York Times, Shakespeare

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Reviving Shylock

May 1, 2013 by Aaron Botwick

That Troublesome Jew Shylock and the Corruption of “The Merchant of Venice” By Aaron Botwick In 1947, the actor and playwright Maurice Schwartz rather audaciously rewrote The Merchant of Venice. The result, Shylock and His Daughter, is a radically philosemitic text, one that throws out most of Shakespeare’s play and replaces it with a kind, Jewish moneylender surrounded by antisemitic, unforgiving Christians.[1] Comic villain had become comic hero. But only five years after 1942—a date that, like 70 CE […]

Categories: Article, Spring 2013 Issue • Tags: anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Shakespeare, theater

Reading 25 April – 1 May 2013 (ZiR)

April 25, 2013 by William Eaton

William Eaton, Zeteo Editorial Adviser [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 25 April 2013 “If I were to generalize,” the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber said recently to a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: anthropology, Camus, Marx, men, Occupy Wall Street, reading, Shakespeare

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Reading 14-20 April 2013 (ZiR)

April 15, 2013 by William Eaton

Rachael Benavidez, Zeteo Associate Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 14 April 2013 To blog or not to blog. The question is does it make you a better writer? Maria Konnikova, a writer and a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Columbia University, argues that it does. In her article “Why Grad Schools Should Require Students to Blog” on the Scientific American blog, she discusses her experience working on her dissertation and how it helped her to […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: blogging, Harlem, New Yorker, Shakespeare, writing

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