Some Thursday Readings – July 30, 2026

 

Did Charles Dickens’s Bleak House Inspire Murder on the Orient Express? – Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads.

 

Such a thing – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“The Heart of the Night,” poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Cave Story – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

“The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten,” poem by Oliver Herford – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Bard Bites Back – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

I Am the Place That Was Ruled by Three Empires – Emily Jaycox at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Illustration: The cover of the first serial installment of Bleak House, 1852.

 

Some Thursday Readings

One of the main characters of my new novel Brookhaven has been a major admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow since he was a child. It’s unusual, because the character is born and raised in Mississippi, and abolitionist Mr. Longfellow was not a popular poet. And Longfellow’s poems, in fact, play a not insignificant role throughout the entire book. 

We recently rewatched the Angel Films movie “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” which tells the story of Longfellow and his family during the Civil War, and how he came to write the poem that became the Christmas carol. The movie takes only minor liberties with the real story. Some years back, Meg Groeling at Emerging Civil War told that story, and it’s every bit as fascinating as the movie.

 

The Other Christmas Truce – Joanna Guldin at Military.com.

 

The Cross and the Machine – Paul Kingsnorth at The Free Press.

 

York Buildings Stairs and the Watergate – A London Inheritance.

 

The Bard at Christmas – Jaspreet Singh Boparai at The Critic Magazine.

 

Boat Prayer – Karla Van Vliet at Every Day Poems.

 

“In the Bleak Midwinter,” poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The First Noel – poem by Seth Lewis. 

 

Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January1863 by Daniel Masters – review at Civil War Books and Authors.

 

Photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about 1860.

"Hamnet": Visualizing What Inspired Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway had three children – Susannah and the twins Judith and Hamnet. In 1596, when the twins were 11, Hamnet died. A week after his son was buried in their hometown of Stratford, Shakespeare was back in London, working on a new play.  

It seems odd to us today that the man would have hurried back so quickly to London after the funeral of his child. I suspect it might have seemed odd even in 1596. Your wife is grieving, your daughters are grieving, your still-living parents are grieving, and you rush back to work. We don’t know what might have been going on in Shakespeare’s mind, as he left no written record of his thoughts about his son’s death.

 

Or did he?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Murder Case in Arden of Faversham, the Greatest Shakespearean-Era Play You’ve Never Heard Of – Amnon Kabatchnik at CrimeReads. 

 

Wings – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Reading the 1913 Edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare”

It was an intriguing invitation. Read all the works of William Shakespeare in a year?  

Poet Dave Malone posed the challenge. Writer Callie Feyen accepted. I wavered, trying to balance time commitments, and then I leaped. But before I told Malone yes, I checked to make sure my memory was correct, and I indeed had a one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I did. I also had several copies of several individual plays, small, hardbound editions published between 1890 and 1930.

 

Also pushing my decision was having read The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the movies Shakespeare in Love and Much Ado About Nothing, which I truly enjoyed, and having seen Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones playing the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2013. 

 

My copy of the 1913 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare has been occupying space on my bookshelves for more than 30 years. Judging by the bookplate, I purchased the book sometime in the late 1980s from Dappled Gray Antiques, a shop in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood that had been across the street from the Kirkwood train station. The antiques are long gone, the owner having retired and moved away. The train station is still there, an Amtrak station operating in a building built in 1893.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The actor Robert Mantell in the stage production of Richard III, from Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare.

Forgotten Classics: “Shakespeare of London” by Marchette Chute

You’re reading an article on literary criticism, and you spot an almost easy-to-overlook aside: “For example, no one has really explained William Shakespeare like Marchette Chute did in 1947.” The reference is to a book she wrote, Shakespeare of London, and it was published in 1950, not 1947. But it was high praise indeed.

You ask yourself, “How is that possible? How is a biography of Shakespeare published 70 years ago better than anything more recent? We have so much more research, so many more historical and literary studies, so much more information. And we have the internet. How could someone make a statement like that?”

They were able to make the statement because it’s true. Shakespeare of London has been long out-of-print, but it is still a classic, and you can still find used copies via sources like Amazon and Alibris.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

This year marks the 400^th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. While Great Britain, never a slouch in the “can we find some anniversary celebration to draw tourists” department, has all kinds of recognitions and celebrations underway in Stratford-on-Avon as well as the rest of the country, the United States is mounting its own extensive series of Shakespeare festivities.

And the bard would likely smile to know he’s become a hashtag on Twitter: #Shakespeare400.

“@RomeoMontague: Hark! What tweet through yon window breaks? It is the moon, and @JulietCapulet is the sun. #Shakespeare400”

And the books. And calendars. And desk diaries. For those of us who might have been worried about the demise of Shakespeare in high school and college English curriculums, a simple search on Amazon for “Shakespeare 2016” is reassuring.

One of the best recently published books on Shakespeare has less to do with the quadricentennial celebration and more to do with what happened a little less than 400 years ago – 1606 to be precise. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, is a wonder of re-creation of that year in Shakespeare life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Anne Hathaway's Dream

I dreamed, Will.

I dreamed of London and its crowds,

its noise and even its city stink

I dreamed of hearing the Danish prince

and the Scot usurper and St. Crispin’s Day

and the king’s daughters,

and seeing them, Will, in garish torchlight.

I dreamed I saw the Queen, Will,

nodding to the crowd as she walked

by the white hall palace, and I chanced

a smile, Will, and she returned it.

I dreamed I saw the river, Will, and rode

a barge close by the Globe.

And nobles in the finery and common folk

in plain dress, both clean and dirty, and I dodged

the bedpan emptied from above,

and I watched the crowd watch a hanging

or two. Or three. They brought refreshments

with them.

And the food, Will, the food in the taverns,

and the drinking with Marlowe and the Earl,

and the laughter and the arguments and seeing

them all, even you, scratch quills on parchment.

I don’t want to die too soon, Will.

I want to dream again.

I want to dream, Will.

Tweetspeak Poetry has a prompt about William Shakespeare and dreams. Take a look and write your own dream poem.

Painting of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare by Roger Brian Dunn (2010) based on a drawing by Nathaniel Curzon (1708).

Happy Birthday, KJV

Baby Boomers can usually remember where they were and what they were doing on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated (this Boomer was in his 7^th grade history class). For the Gen X generation, it was the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. For all of us, it was Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s another date from my childhood that I remember well, one month to the day after President Kennedy was killed. I was standing in Faith Lutheran Church in a suburb of New Orleans. There were 12 of us standing in front of the entire congregation – the new students in the catechism class – and we were there to receive a leather Bible from the church. Each of these blue cover Bibles was inscribed with our names, the name of the congregation and the date.

We had already been meeting since September. The catechism class was comprised of seventh and eighth graders. My class was a small one; a year-and-a-half later, when we were confirmed and made our first communion, the original 12 had dwindled to four. Moves, job transfers had taken a toll on our class. And in the group of four, I would be the only boy. The three girls were thrilled because, they predicted, I would be singled out to answer all the hard questions the pastor would ask us in front of the congregation. I thought they would be wrong. I should have known better; females predict the future better than males.

On that Dec. 22, 1963, the Bibles we were given was the King James Version (with maps). In the intervening 47 years, that Bible is still in remarkably good shape. The volume we were given was published by the American Bible Society.

This year marks the 400^th anniversary of that translation of the Bible. In 1611, the group of scholars (18 from the Church of England and four Puritans) saw their work of seven years come to fruition. Its influence on the Protestant faith has been enormous – it reigned supreme for the next three centuries and even today is still one the bestselling books on any list.

It’s intriguing that the King James version was a contemporary of the other great English influence on language, culture and thought – William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and the KJV together have shaped the language we speak today and the history we share. Its words and phrases can be found in everything from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the Liberty Bell to the inscription on the gates of Harvard (whether the faculty and students there realize it or not), writes Leland Ryken, a professor of English at Wheaton College and author of The Legacy of the King James Bible, in an article Saturday in the Wall Street Journal.

When you consider that English is the language of global business and commerce, the impact of the KJV and Shakespeare go far beyond the countries where English is the native language.

Since 1611,there have been other translations, of course – the New American Standard, the Revised, the New KJV, the New International Version (the NIV is the one I use most often), even a politically correct NIV. But nothing surpasses the beauty of the KJV.

If you’re skeptical, simply read aloud the 23^rd Psalm in the KJV version, and then do the same with any of the more contemporary versions. There is simply no comparison. Reading the KJV today is almost like reading poetry.

Its influence has been huge, but it’s also been particular, especially in the life of a 12-year-old who stood with his fellow catechumens in a church in 1963.