Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Feb 18 2025 - Shakespeare and Snow

 

Did Shakespeare experience snow?  What would he say about the deep chill after the big snow storm? He grew up in the middle of England where there was snow and ice in the winter.   Rain, winds, cold and tempests show up in all his work - Blow, blow thou Winter wind sorts of things. I got to wondering about whether he mentions snow.  So went and checked it out.

In winter with warm tears I’ll melt the snow
And keep eternal spring-time on thy face
.
– Titus Andronicus; Act III, scene i


For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap cheque’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness every where.

– Sonnet 5

Cold snow melts with the sun’s hot beams.
– Henry VI, Part 2, 3.1.224
 

That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow!
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.63
 

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.
– Love’s Labor’s Lost, 1.1.109

We think of Shakespeare with spring and summer weather - especially with his most famous poem - Sonnet 18 - "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day.?"  There are over seventy references to roses.  Definitely Shakespeare voted for roses over snow.

 

Isn't this excellent - I found this image of one of the Painted Ladies gardens in Grimsby Beach from a few winters ago.
 
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Thursday, June 29, 2023

June 29 2023 - If Music Be

 

I wonder if that is in the Guinness Book of Records - watch students from the 2012 Shakespeare School work their way through 37 famous Shakespeare quotes in two minutes.  Here it is - https://youtu.be/aVKwmCVhpqQ - lots of fun.

And what are some unusual ice cream flavours?  We're almost at summer, so it is time to get acquainted with what's new.  Here's one:

Vanilla:  In Bristol, England
The flavor of this ice cream isn’t what makes it weird—an English ice cream maker added the proteins that make jellyfish glow to his vanilla recipe. When you lick the ice cream the proteins activate, causing your scoops to light up.

Pizza: In Philadelphia
You’ll definitely want to eat this pizza cold. A shop in Philly whips up pizza-flavored ice cream using tomato, basil, oregano, salt, and garlic.

Tiger Tail:  Edmonton
No big cats were harmed in the making of this confection! Orange flavored and swirled with black licorice sauce, the ice cream is named for its tigerlike coloring. 

Pet Bird:  Tokyo
A Tokyo ice cream shop has flavors such as sparrow and parakeet. But you won’t find feathers in the scoops—the flavors just contain the things these birds eat, like fruit, nuts, and seeds.

That's a contrast to seemingly tame flavours like lavender peach, grand mariner, peanut butter and jelly, pink perppercorn and sake, rosemary citrus, rhubarb crumble and more HERE at Taste of Home.

And returning to our Shakespearean quotes.  What would music be compared to in the picture below?  This is from the Watering Can.
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Saturday, March 18, 2023

Mar 18 2023 - We are such Stuff

 

Shakespeare wrote in the Tempest:  "We are such stuff As dreams are made on."  It turns he didn't originate the expression but built on it so that it became profound in its poetry. That's what Shakespeare seemed to do effortlessly. 

Here is Prospero's speech:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.

Carl Sagan did the same - he turned it into this famous line: “we're made of star stuff,”  and he continues with: "We are awake for the Cosmos to know itself."

Which stuff - the newer parts or the older ones? One scientific team has found that oxygen being a heavier element was synthesized earlier in the inner parts of the galaxy than in the outer parts, and that means that because are are composed of so much oxygen that we come from the oldest parts:

“It’s a great human interest story that we are now able to map the abundance of all of the major elements found in the human body across hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way,” said Jennifer Johnson of The Ohio State University. “This allows us to place constraints on when and where in our galaxy life had the required elements to evolve, a sort ‘temporal Galactic habitable zone’”.

 

This is another display at the Hamilton Gage Park spring show this week.

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Friday, June 24, 2022

June 24 2022 - Some Explaining to do

 

Was it Shakespeare?  No, it was Lucy and Ricky.  "Lucy, You Got some Splainin to do."  Can you imagine finding out that e never said this exact phrase.  And he never said:  "Lucy, I'm home. " 

There are more quotes that were never said:  "We're gonna need a bigger boat." "Luke, I am your father." "Play it again, Sam."  "Do you feel lucky, punk?"  They are all immortal lines from the big screen.  "Beam me up, Scotty."  That was never said, either.  The closest was "Beam us up, Mr Scott."  That was once.  Or "Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor."  Or "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."  It must be TV sci-fi shows.   One of our favourites was to run around waving our arms exclaiming:  "Danger, Will Robinson" - it was only exclaimed once on Lost in Space. 

How do we live in such a poor recall time where we twist up and contort things?  

We didn't ever twist Shakespeare's famous lines. Take Hamlet's soliloquy's first line "To be, or not to be: that is the question".

There's Polonius' pep talk:  "This above all:  to thine own self be true."

Or Malvolio in Twelfth Night:  “…be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

Yes, and you can quote Shakespeare exactly on:  "All the world's a stage" and "What a piece of work is man".

Another place we get quotes wrong is the Bible:  'Money is the root of all evil.' It actually is: The love of money is the root of all evil, according to Timothy 6:10.

But we don't actually get the words wrong in the Bible.  The explanations are that we are misinterpreting the meaning, rather than getting the actual words wrong.  That brings us back to Ricky who might say "You've got some splaining to do about this Bible verse."

I call this house in Grimsby "The Doll's House".  

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Thursday, January 4, 2018

Twelfth Night or What You Will

There are quite a few variations for this penultimate day of the Twelve Days.  Ladies dancing, ladies spinning, badgers baiting, lords a-leading, dancers a-dancing, lads a-louping, bulls a-beating. 

Our Twelfth Night of Christmas is tomorrow.  It is "always on the evening of 5 January, but the Twelfth Day can either precede or follow the Twelfth Night according to which Christian tradition is followed. Twelfth Night is followed by the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January. In some traditions, the first day of Epiphany (6 January) and the twelfth day of Christmas overlap". (source:  Wikipedia)

So what about "Twelfth Night, or What You Will" - Shakespeare's play?  It is believed to have been written around 1601-02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The first recorded performance was on 2 February 1602, at Candlemas, the formal end of Christmastide in the year's calendar. 


A law student, John Manningham, who was studying in the Middle Temple in London, described the performance which took place in the hall of the Middle Temple. 

The Middle Temple is a place with great  architectural history. The western part of "The Temple" was the headquarters of the Knights Templar until they dissolved in 1312.  There are many buildings in the four "Inns of Court" that are listed buildings. There has been damage over the centuries - fires, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz. But the Halls' magnificent double-hammer beam roof remains along with the 29 foot oak High table. Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake have been known to dine in the Hall. 

The buildings in the Temple itself are still held under the 1608 letters patent of James I.  The Middle Temple Hall where our performance took place was constructed between 1562 and 1572, and opened in 1576 by Queen Elizabeth I.  It was thought that Shakespeare himself was probably present for the first performance. 

Our heroine in the play is Viola.  Violas and pansies are flowers that are closely related.  I've never considered how they are different.  I found this: If the flower has four petals pointing upward and only one pointing downward – you’re looking at a Pansy. If the flower has two petals pointing upward and three petals pointing downward – you’ve got a Viola.  These words, though, come from one of Shakespeare's other plays.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Shakespeare is In Us

The topic of the interconnectedness of planets in Astrology led me to a memory. I remember reading that energy cannot be created or destroyed so that Shakespeare's atoms have dispersed throughout our planet and we have atoms of Shakespeare in us - all of us.

I found this Scientific American  article:  Is energy always conserved, even in the case of the expanding universe? It turns out to be the case.

This metaphor of our connectedness to Shakespeare is charming and real.  Here's the article that estimates the number of Shakespeare's atoms in a living human being. 


"If you live to 75 years, some 500 trillion of his atoms enter you during your life."

The interconnectedness also shows up for me when I take photos of urban grunge.  These are pictures of decay of various surfaces - e.g. paint on wood or metal, on asphalt, rust patterns.  The patterns and shapes of their decay are consistent with the patterns and shapes in organic materials in nature.

This is a picture of decaying metal on a rail car at Strasburg last year.  Black paint in crackling with red paint underneath.  Most viewers see something in the range of a volcano's lava flow.  Isn't it remarkable for this quality?