Barbara Everett was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays. Among her subjects in the LRB have been Shakespeare’s romances, the Sonnets, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and Falstaff. Her selected pieces for the LRB were recently published as a book. She died on Friday, 4 April 2025 at the age of 92.
Two actors enter to begin a play, in an assumed midnight darkness. Both are military men, sentinels. One, Barnardo, barks at the other, Francisco, the play’s first line: ‘Who’s there?’ This incisiveness turns out to be mistaken: the man challenged is the still functioning true guard, who corrects Barnardo: ‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.’
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Introducing his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate.’ As a...
The hopeless, who hadNowhere else to go, he packedInto his house. So
Loneliness took onThe look of home, duty grewUseful, like tea-cups.
TrialsThey go like lightningOver jumps, under tunnels,Up slides and down, then
(Best of all) needle-Thread small transverse hoops as ifFreed of being dogs.
Barbara Everett’s book consists of her four Northcliffe Lectures, given at University College London in 1988, on Hamlet and the other ‘major’ tragedies, together with a number...
Faced with the average book of modern literary criticism, the reviewer may wisely resolve to say nothing about the author’s skills as a writer of prose. If they ever existed, they would...
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