Amit Majmudar
Life to the Image, Death to the Word
Sometimes a specific, historical incident has the interpretability of a parable. An example: How the cannons in Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last play (actually a collaboration with John Fletcher), set off a fire that burned down the original Globe theater in…
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The Abundance: OneWorld (UK) Q & A excerpt
Not to plug my own forthcoming second novel, but–aw, why the hell not? THE ABUNDANCE is coming out from Holt/Metropolitan on March 5, 2012, and from OneWorld in the UK a couple months after that. I happen to hate it…
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“Western” and “Modern”
It is interesting to note that among Indian Hindus, the words “Western” and “modern” are well-nigh interchangeable in usage. That is, a “modern” way of dressing, loving and marrying, political governance, or making music corresponds, in this part of…
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Shakespeare’s Mystical Rhyme: On “The Phoenix and the Turtle”
For a writer frequently claimed to represent or comprehend all of human experience, there is remarkably little theology, mysticism, or overt religiosity in Shakespeare. We have his audience to thank for this, perhaps—Elizabethan London’s playgoers had lost interest in mystery…
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The Alternate Bard: On Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to an aristocrat, and full of the conceits and set-piece sequences and strict stanzas that appealed to the refined tastes of his age. Venus and Adonis was…
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