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…

Why You Should Read Allan Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’

What Scottish play, published in 1725, reached over 100 printings by 1800, was called ‘the noblest pastoral’ by Robert Burns, inspired more than forty paintings, more than ‘from the entire works of Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, or Fielding’ (R. Altick, Paintings from Books), and was performed by amateur companies throughout Scotland as late as the end of the 19th century?