Funky cold Messina …

Among the many translations of Much Ado About Nothing, that into Italian seems the most appropriate. In Italy, love, intrigue and treachery seem fit matters for comedy: Silvio Berlusconi is a very ordinary Italian, exceptional only in how keenly he plays the national sport(s). The play translates well. Beatrice’s famous complaint about a hairy husband [...]

Read Full Post »

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

I am a great Shakespeare fan (as my post during last year’s Shakespeare Week proved) but the question of authorship has never really been of much interest to me. I was vaguely aware of the authorship controversy, but didn’t know any details. I never once questioned that Will of Stratford, despite the limitations of his [...]

Read Full Post »

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl

Reading Charles Nicoll’s masterly slice into Shakespeare’s life story The Lodger has made me reflect on the frustrations of knowing so little about him. We have an outline of his life, we have some vital statistics and a family tree, and we have a beautiful setting in Stratford-on-Avon for its beginning and end. There are [...]

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare and Me

I didn’t always love Shakespeare. As a teenager I took the view – without ever having read any – that it was a load of flowery faff. All “Wherefore art thou?” nonsense. No one really talks like that. But then we read Macbeth in class and although I fell in line with the general grumblings, [...]

Read Full Post »

Coming Up: Shakespeare Week

You knew it had to happen. Eventually, the Foxes would turn their sights on the person some consider the greatest writer in the English language. Yes, it’s Shakespeare Week on VL! We have memories, mysteries and a bona fide movie star, frequent Guest Fox, Edward Petherbridge, who has been in various theatrical productions of the [...]

Read Full Post »

School’s Out!

We have a fairly heavy schedule coming up on VL over the next few months, so we’ve decided to take our summer break early this year.  We’re  leaving the site ticking over in neutral for the next fortnight  in order to give ourselves a bit of a breather. Fear not though, because we – like [...]

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare – a Sonnet a Day

Part of Poetry Week Well, almost. On impulse, a little while ago I signed up to a website that emails me a Shakespeare sonnet. It has been a fascinating experience – three times a week, always on a working day, so not often when I have the leisure to stop and read it with attention, [...]

Read Full Post »

Thursday Soapbox: Poetry Still Matters

When many people think of poetry, they probably imagine a guy in a puffy-sleeved shirt haughtily intoning incomprehensible sentences. Even folks who read other sorts of books will shy away from poetry. Is it because they view poetry as too dense, too frou frou, too irrelevant? If so, when does that attitude set in? After [...]

Read Full Post »

Poetry Week on Vulpes Libris

It’s the 2nd Annual Poetry Week on VL and this time we take a more intimate angle. Not only do we discuss the poems, some of them classics, but we also reveal some very personal reactions to them. We have Shakespeare, Marti, Hughes and a mystery.There’s also childrens’ poetry and an essay on the role [...]

Read Full Post »

Poetry Week: John Donne, The Reformed Soul

I studied the poetry of John Donne for A Level, and loved it: how could a seventeen year old not love a poet who writes about sex as Heaven and Hell, and berates and begs his God with the fury of a lover? Who argues his girl into bed, and talks his way into his deity’s heart, [...]

Read Full Post »