Swiftly Seen Shakespeare: Reflections on Binging the Bard, Part I
There’s nothing like binge-watching your favorite franchise to help you see the larger patterns in the weave, and having just recently achieved one of my more minor lifetime reading goals of absorbing all of Shakespeare by binging a large number of Shakespearean film adaptations, I find myself itching to share with someone some of my observations. Since the day I write this is the Fourth of July, it seems appropriate to begin with observations that connect Shakespeare to us here in America, even, more specifically, us here in the American South. It should not surprise anyone that Shakespeare’s English shares certain properties with English here in the American South, given that the history of the South begins in his lifetime. The very first of the Colonies was, after all, Virginia, named in honor of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabe...