Uncle Bill Shakespeare...Alive and Well!

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Been There said:
I have to tell you, I am a loyal Stephen King fan. I have several of his books. These are only the novels and with this book, he used the pseudonym Richard Bachman because he wanted to find out if people were buying his books because of his name or his writing ability.

My favorite book was “Thinner.” Favorite movie or screenplay was “The Shawshank Redemption.” There are a few close seconds in both categories.
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They did a pretty good job with, The Green Mile too.
 
Meanderer said:
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"Failing to recognize our love of salt can be our undoing. It is as true in literature as it is in life. In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the aged king asks his three daughters to quantify their love for him. The older daughters, Goneril and Regan, who ultimately will betray their father, flatter him with hyperbole."

"The youngest daughter, Cordelia, who truly loves him declines to answer, thinking it a silly question. When Lear insists upon a response she offers a curious reply, “I love you…as fresh meat loves salt.” Taking affront, he casts her out and divides his kingdom between his two daughters. Bad choice as it turns out."

"Later in the play, Lear comes to understand that meat does love salt; rather people love meat only if it is salted. He also comes to learn that false praise is hollow and is ultimately reunited with the virtuous but ill-fated, Cordelia. Shakespeare did not discover salt’s importance; he merely enshrined it in literature."
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Are you familiar with Christopher Moore's book, Fool? It is a very well done comedy (well narrated for audio) that incorporates elements of King Lear and Macbeth, two of my favorite plays.

Also, Macbeth: A Novel By A. J. Hartley and David Hewson, is an excellent retelling and fleshing-out of Macbeth.
 

Why the moons of Uranus are named after characters in Shakespeare​

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Five moons of Uranus are shown here: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon (from left to right). NASA/JPL-Caltech
"What’s in a name?" Shakespeare’s star-crossed Juliet famously wanted to know. And for those of us peering skyward, it’s a question for the ages: Where do celestial bodies get their names from?

There are constellations and planets christened after Greek and Roman gods. The craters on Mercury are artists and musicians, like Bach, John Lennon and Disney. And the moons of the planet Uranus — there are, impressively, 27 altogether — have literary ties — 25 of them relate to characters in Shakespeare’s plays.

For centuries, whoever discovered a celestial body usually had dibs on the naming rights. But when it comes to Uranus’ moons, details are murky about who exactly began doling out Shakespearean monikers. READ MORE
 
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies​


By Elizabeth Winkler
416 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster

Reviewed by Don Rubin*

"When American cultural writer Elizabeth Winkler published a free-lance article in the venerable and well-respected journal The Atlantic four years ago speculating rather innocently that Shakespeare’s plays were more than simply feminist-inflected and suggested that maybe Shakespeare was actually a woman using a male pseudonym, she quickly found herself under attack from those who prefer Shakespeare just the way he has been traditionally portrayed: as a barely-educated provincial male."

"Traditional Stratfordians, of course, seem to ignore the fact that the writer — whose female characters are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their erudition as cross-dressing lawyers or even (like Gertrude and Cleopatra) running countries as Queens — never actually bothered to teach his own daughters to read or write. How dare one question the rags-to-riches Stratfordian creation myth? Or anything else that might seem slightly off about the man from Stratford as the world’s greatest author."

"Things like the dating of the plays which — shoe-horned into the dates of the Stratford man – require us to believe that he wrote two to three full-length plays a year (in iambic pentameter for good measure) for 17 consecutive years all while occasionally acting. And then, while in retirement for another six years back in provincial Stratford, wrote not a poem or even a letter to anyone. Nor did he keep a single manuscript. Or when this most famous writer died, the theatre world in London (still producing his plays) took absolutely no notice. No eulogies. No nothing."

"A silence which lasted seven years until the two sons of Mary Sidney (one of them married to the daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere) published a collection of Shakespeare’s plays — the First Folio. Add into this, the fact that the well-researched life of the Stratford man shows not a stitch of documented proof that he was actually a writer. Yes, there was a writer named Shakespeare. Yes, there was a man from Stratford named Shakespeare. But were they one and the same?"

"It was into this loaded mousetrap that Winkler walked with her speculations about Shakespeare possibly being a woman named Emilia Bassano. After publication of her magazine article, Stratfordians round the world went wild. Some actually going to her editors to demand corrections and apologies."

READ MORE
 
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