[Shakespeare] … could experiment so wildly with the language in his later plays. The earliest ones are strictly respectful of English syntax, and obedient with English grammar and vocabulary. The later ones break all the rules. Shakespeare knew he could hold an audience spellbound, whether they could follow his verbiage or not. He earned a freedom no subsequent poet in English till the twentieth century would dare to imitate; whenupon, those who tried, failed.
Yet he is a poet, a disciplined poet, and a thinker, too; and was a man of very broad if chaotic reading, as we are still discovering. His Latin was superb, and what he comprehended from the Roman poets, Ovid especially, was of a higher quality than dribbling academics can imagine. His thefts from Plutarch are always astute, but also from Livy. What he learnt from the ancient comedians, however, was nothing on what he could teach them.
To call him “the Bard” is to subscribe to the common, ignorant view that he was a “noble savage,” an untutored force of nature. The French, in their formality, are mostly responsible for this error of the Enlightenment; it was among the many things Voltaire got wrong, as the insidious depth of the master dramatist undermined his poppet classicism.
Shakespeare meditated deeply on English history, and on history at large. He went beyond presenting it in narrative form. Like a documentary filmmaker, he takes what he needs from the historical record, discards the rest, and changes anything that does not fit his programme. This is also his strategy in the Comedies and the Tragedies, never paying for a plot when he can steal one. For the world is full of plots, and one is like another. The world is full of mud and rock, but the master mason can shape and lay them. The master sculptor permits the stone to speak.
He did not have a theory of history, or a theory of anything else — a mediaeval mind does not think in “theories” — but a profound sense of how the world works, and of the contending spirits animating it. He summons spirits, and strange to say they come.
David Warren, “Four Centuries Later”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-04-23.
May 3, 2016
QotD: Shakespeare
May 2, 2016
Suleiman the Magnificent – IV: The Shadow of God – Extra History
Published on 2 Apr 2016
When a dispute arose over the control of Hungary, Suleiman saw an opportunity to extend his empire into Europe and gain allies from those who’d asked for his help. Though he took Buda quickly, Vienna had time to fortify against him and pushed his troops back.
Suleiman looked back on those heady days, and wondered how his victories had all turned to ash…
After the Battle of Mohács, Suleiman found himself quickly pulled into the politics of western Europe. The Queen Mother of France asked him to intercede for her in a quarrel with the King of Spain, and the Austrian Hapsburgs had claimed Hungary as their own territory despite his recent victory there. The Hungarians, meanwhile, had elected their own king John Zápolya and refused to acknowledge the Austrians. Suleiman decided to settle the matter by marching with his armies again, and found Zápolya a willing ally. Bad weather slowed his advance and cut his numbers, but he nonetheless took Buda by storm and made an example out of the Austrians they found there. When they got to Vienna, however, they found that the city had been fortified and reinforced by several European nations. Though Suleiman offered a king’s ransom to the first man over the walls of Vienna, his troops just couldn’t push through. The arrival of winter forced him to withdraw the siege, unsuccessful. He pretend to consider it a victory, but he knew that this defeat meant he’d never be able to acquire the European empire he had dreamed about. Besides, he was growing older, and the question of succession weighed heavy on his mind. By tradition, only one of his sons would be allowed to live and inherit the throne, but he couldn’t bear the thought of his beloved Roxelana forced to watch her sons die. Especially considering his most likely heir, Mustafa, wasn’t a son of Roxelana’s at all. The quandary weighed heavy on him.
QotD: Laurier’s liberalism
The original and proper meaning of liberal is a defender of individual liberty, a fierce opponent to big and intrusive government. That was the liberalism of George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Edward Blake and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. It is not the liberalism of the Trudeau Family or their cronies. Very much the opposite.
Yet modern pseudo-liberals love to invoke the name of Laurier. It links them with one of the country’s nation builders. A century later they’re borrowing the glory of his accomplishments to hide their own shabby schemes for power. Pierre Trudeau even hung a picture of Laurier in his office, as if the man who spoke of “freedom is our nationality” was looking down and endorsing the most anti-freedom administration in Canadian history.
Richard Anderson, “The Sunny Ways of Justin Trudeau”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2015-10-22.
May 1, 2016
Minnesota Vikings 2016 draft – third day
Coming into the third and final day of the 2016 NFL draft, the Minnesota Vikings started the day holding the following picks:
- Fourth round: 23rd (121st overall)
- Fifth round: 23rd (160th overall)
- Sixth round: 5th (180th overall, from San Francisco)
- Sixth round: 11th (186th overall, from Miami)
- Seventh round: 19th (240th overall, from Buffalo)
- Seventh round: 23rd (244th overall)
And here’s how the last day of the draft played out for Minnesota:
T.E. Lawrence And How He Became Lawrence Of Arabia I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 30 Apr 2016
Check out HistoryBuffs review of Lawrence of Arabia: http://bit.ly/NickOfArabia
Big thank you to Nick from History Buffs for this collaboration. It was really fun!
T.E. Lawrence better known as Lawrence of Arabia is one of the biggest legends of World War 1. His adventures in the Middle East during the Arab Revolt were made into a movie and a bestselling book. But how did Lawrence actually end up in Cairo? And what was his relationship with Faisal?
QotD: The wonders of shellac
The finish had been subject to extremes of sunlight and temperature and humidity. Not left outdoors, but I figured an attic or something. My neighbor later told me that it was left on an enclosed porch for many years. Bingo. The finish was missing here and there, but what there was looked like suede when you ran your finger across it. It was completely crisscrossed with fingermarks going every which way. I pawed at it a bit, running through the rusty filing cabinet of my mind to figure out what I was looking at. It came to me in a vision — all at once.
I knew it was shellac. Of all the dumb luck. No one had “fixed” this piece of furniture in 75 years. It didn’t have any new, improved finish that wouldn’t last but couldn’t be fixed. It wasn’t “eco,” another word for wasteful useless disposable plastic crap. The finish was made from the nasty ooze that comes out of a lac bug and dries on a tree branch. Your favorite Hindoo used to gather the stuff by putting tarps on the ground under trees where the lac bugs congregate, and then beating the limbs with sticks to make the amber flakes rain down. When you mix lac leavings with alcohol, you get shellac. It’s wonderful stuff.
Shellac sticks to anything. Anything sticks to shellac. Shellac can be diluted till there’s barely a whisper of lac left in it, but it still makes a coherent film. It seals knots. Shellac can be polished to mirror shine if you want to. A technique called French polishing is the finish you saw on Baron Percy Devonshire Smythe XXIVth’s harewood and mahogany gaming table back when King George was still gibbering on his throne. You can make shellac look like anything you want. Our dresser had pigment mixed in with it to make a kind of varnish stain that could be sprayed on in one coat as an all-purpose stain/finish.
Shellac is so safe for humans to handle that you can eat it, and you might have. They used to make the capsules that drugs and vitamins come in out of shellac. And the greatest thing about shellac, at least for me, is that no matter how old it is, it immediately dissolves and gets loose in the presence of alcohol, just like everyone at your office Christmas party.
Sippican Cottage, “Happy Birthday, Mrs. King”, Sippican Cottage, 2016-04-20.
