• Watercolour landscape showing a coastline with building and mine shafts dotted along the shore. In the background there are fields leading to hills.

Shakespeare’s Instability

by Jeffrey Knapp The first speaker in one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays is not a prince, like Hamlet, or a lover, like Juliet, or a warrior, like Macbeth. He’s a drunken beggar. And he’s incensed that the hostess of the tavern…