William Shakespeare

Articles

• #Ulysse 3773
  14 juin 2022, par Guillaume Vissac

  —But Ann Hathaway ? Mr Best’s quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

• #Ulysse 3832
  12 août 2022, par Guillaume Vissac

  —If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.

• #Ulysse 4038
  7 mars 2023, par Guillaume Vissac

  — Why ? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As You Like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure - and in all the other plays which I have not read.

• #Ulysse 4727
  28 janvier, par Guillaume Vissac

  —I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

• #Ulysse 3764
  5 juin 2022, par Guillaume Vissac

  —Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries ? John Eglinton’s carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

• #Ulysse 4044
  13 mars 2023, par Guillaume Vissac

  —And what a character is Iago ! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père ?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

• #Ulysse 3847
  27 août 2022, par Guillaume Vissac

  —His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.

• #Ulysse 4045
  14 mars 2023, par Guillaume Vissac

  — Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it : prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says : If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

• #Ulysse 586
  13 septembre 2013, par Guillaume Vissac

  Open your eyes. No. Jesus ! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably !

• #Ulysse 1405
  13 décembre 2015, par Guillaume Vissac

  Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide.