John Kerrigan is a professor of English at Cambridge and a convener of the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies. His works include Shakespeare’s Binding Language, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon and Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707.
‘There is a touch of Shylock in this,’ John Kerrigan says of a moment in King Lear. There are touches of Shylock in many places outside The Merchant of Venice, and indeed outside...
We never went on holiday to foreign countries when I was a child. Not to properly foreign ones, anyway. Although we lived on the South Coast, the family Hillman Minx would head not towards a...
We wouldn’t think of anything as a tragedy if we did not have a deeply ingrained sense of order already there to be affronted. Tragedy in life, and as art, exposes by violation our mostly...
Humane, learned, un-showily stylish and at times moving in their tender intelligence, these essays by Anne Barton, ranging from a richly ‘mellow’ piece first published in 1953 –...
It may be assumed that the Dark Lady and the Fair Young Man are at least in part merely Anne Hathaway: a woman seen in darkness and in light, masked and unmasked, always a shadowy haunter of the poet’s...
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