Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare

Justice Alito’s Dissent in Loving v. Virginia

In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down miscegenation statutes, which criminalized interracial marriage, as unconstitutional. In 2013, the Court in United States v. Windsor invalidated Section 3 of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), which precluded federal agencies from recognizing marriages between same-sex couples even if the marriages were ...

Living Zen, Loving God (review)

Triaging Shakespeare

Dear Ben, I just got the reviews back on my grant proposal for Hamlet, the new play I was telling you about. I applied to the National Institutes of Health in America this time—the RFA said they’re interested in creative new ideas and all that rot but they’re just as conservative as here in England. It wasn’t even discussed! I’ll wager it was those scoundrels Beaumont and Fletcher that sank it....

Melville / Shakespeare

That Melville's Moby Dick contains nearly measureless references to the reading of Shakespeare is an old story featuring the whaling epic's persistent Shakespearean verbal echoes, the composition and sequencing of scenes, and the construction of Ahab as a tragic hero-villain, his shipmen as "knights and squires" and heroic commoners all caught in a tragic drama of the excesses and shortcomings ...

Shakespeare, Text and Paratext

The early modern dramatic paratext is a rich and varied repository of tributes to patrons and readers, where dramatists negotiated or parodied their attitudes towards dramatic publication and their reliance on the medium of print as a source of income and literary reputation. However, the lack of signed dedications or addresses to the reader in the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays has defl...