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Love's Labor's Lost by William Shakespeare My rating: 4 of 5 stars This early Shakespearean comedy, dating from the 1590s, is paradoxically slight but weighty, thin but dense. That's no doubt partially owing to the lavish verbal resources it spends on such a simple plot. The story it tells is this: the King of Navarre… Continue reading William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
Richard II by William Shakespeare My rating: 4 of 5 stars It seems that most Shakespeare plays trail famous commentary from luminaries of British letters, usually Johnson or Hazlitt or Coleridge. But this Signet Classics edition puts at the head of its criticism section what appears to be the most famous commentary on this play… Continue reading William Shakespeare, Richard II
Late in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, his heroine, Oedipa Maas, having stumbled upon the long transatlantic conspiracy of a Tory Anarchist underground postal service founded by a disinherited Spaniard and used by the plotters and by the dispossessed, wanders all night around San Francisco. There she encounters evidence of the postal underground… Continue reading On Bloomsday
