The Paramaterial Phantasy
It has been nearly a year since I have posted to my website, but, rest assured, I have continued my engagement with the medieval, early modern, and printmaking worlds. I want to assure you that this website, like print itself, is not dead. You can always find these woodcuts and many others at my Etsy […]
Part I. “He thinks tis but our fantasy”: The Ontology and Epistemology of Ghosts and Spirits In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the skeptical and possibly Stoic Horatio reveals to the melancholic eponymous prince that he has seen a phantasm. Before Horatio can even reveal his harrowing yet problematic tale of seeing a “form like [Hamlet’s] father,” […]
Nearly everyone is familiar with the ubiquitous dorm room and man-cave wall hanging that is popularly known as “Dogs Playing Poker.” This series of sixteen predominantly card-playing canines, cigar advertisements from the early twentieth century, reveal a fascination with anthropomorphized animals, especially when they are engaged in illicit activity or otherwise questionable behavior. This corporate […]
Than who is he that will take pleasure in vayne apparell, which if it be worne but a while will fall to ragges, and if it be not worne, will soone rotte or els be eaten with mothes. –Anatomie of Abuses. Philip Stubbes. The past week I’ve been terribly sick, and while I was not […]
“He that filches from me my good name”: Envy, the Kalender of Shepherds, and the “iii Edgyd sworde” of Iago’s Tongue. A Possible New Source for Othello. Part I: “Envious people be the greateste mortherers of the worlde & gretest theves”: Othello III.iii. 160-166 and Richard Pynson’s 1506 The Kalender of Shepherdes In Shakespeare’s Proverbial […]
I. “The Arbaian trees their medicinable gum”: Othello’s Weeping Trees During Othello’s suicide speech, he makes several references that have attracted the attention of modern editors and scholars. The most famous concerns the textual variations between the Quarto and Folio versions of the line “Like a base Indian, threw a pearl away.” Whereas the Quarto […]
Earlier this week, a study of the bones found buried beneath a Leicester car park rocked conventional Shakespeare scholarship. The DNA tests performed by the University of Leicester confirmed every early modernist’s darkest fears that Richard III was, indeed, the hunchback William Shakespeare depicted. As Randal Overtree, professor of early modern literature at the University […]
While writing my last post on Ambroise Paré’s monstrous Phantasy, I came across a reference to Genesis 30 that captured my own imagination. Having researched and written before on the passages from Paré and Montaigne I discussed there, I somehow overlooked the bizarre Biblical reference that appeared in each. In previously thinking about representations of […]
My last post sketched out how the paramaterial mind emerges towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will have more to say about deceiving the external and internal senses in that play in a later post, but I first want to focus on a much shorter and less complex poem to develop […]
portion of my last post’s title comes from the fifth act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Hippolyta and Theseus discuss the strange alterations of love they have just witnessed in the forest. Hippolyta declares the speeches delivered by the lovers as “strange,” prompting The Duke’s declaration of the vulnerability […]