SEAMUS HEANEY

  

Yesterday Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize-winning Northern Irish poet,  died in hospital in  Dublin  after a short illness.

Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht  Jimmy Deenihan said Mr Heaney  "was a huge figure internationally, just a great ambassador for literature obviously but also for Ireland".  

Here you can read the whole article.

SINGING ALONG WITH CRAIG DAVID

Craig Ashley David  is an English singer-songwriter who rose to fame in 1999 featuring on the single Re-Rewind by Artful Dodger. David's debut album, Born to Do It, was released on 14 August 2000, after which he has since released five further studio albums and worked with a variety of artists such as  Kano and Sting.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

Love's Labour's Lost  is one of  Shakespeare's romance comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, making it contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet and  A Midsummer Night's Dream. It  was first published in 1598. The title page states that the play was "Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere," which has suggested to some scholars a revision of an earlier version. The play next appeared in print in the First Folio in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred at Christmas time in 1597 at Court before Queen Elizabeth.

Love's Labour's Lost  is one of those plays which seem difficult on the page (all dense wordplay, leaping from one literary level to another), but work marvellously on stage. It was one of Shakespeare's first attempts to blend romantic comedy with farce and to import the style of each into the other.  The play concerns the subject of love, includes lots of rhetoric and witty exchanges by the characters, and has a happy ending, although it does not end with a marriage.

REPORTED SPEECH

Reported speech refers to a sentence reporting what someone has said.  It is almost always used in spoken English.
In reported speech the tenses, word-order and pronouns may be different from those in the original sentence.

If simple present, present perfect or the future is used in the reporting verb (i.e. says) the tense is retained. Look at these example sentences:

For example:

He says the test is difficult.

She has said that she watches TV every day.

William will say that he comes to school every day.

If the reporting verb (i.e. said) is in the past, the reported clause will be in a past form. This form is usually one step back into the past from the original. Look at these example sentences:

For example:

He said the test was difficult.

She said she watched TV every day.

Jack said he came to school every day.

DISCOVERING REGENCY ENGLAND

"In her novels, Jane Austen brilliantly portrayed the lives of the middle and upper classes, but barely mentioned the cast of characters who constituted the bulk of the population," Roy and Lesley Adkins write in their book, Jane Austen's England.
The authors offer a detailed analysis of early 19^th-century England, producing an  enlightening textbook of the life of both rich privileged and poor ordinary people who were the background in all of Jane Austen's books.

Without a doubt  Jane Austen wrote superb stories of the middle and upper class society set during the Regency  (here you can find an overview of that period), yet this book depicts the world which surrounded her during forty-one years of life. With the aid of diaries, newspaper articles, legal documents, memoirs and histories, it describes Jane Austen and her life,  but what's more it concentrates on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, who comprised three-quarters of the British population, including the great novelist herself.

Here you can read a newspaper article about Roy and Lesley Adkins' book. 

OTHELLO

I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak

Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe. 

Othello, Act V, scene ii

Here you can find a detailed analysis of Othello, one of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Written around 1603, the play tells the story of a powerful general of the Venetian army, Othello, whose life and marriage are ruined by a manipulative, deceitful, and envious soldier, Iago.
Othello is perhaps the most famous literary exploration of the corruptive powers of jealousy and suspicion.  At the same time, it is among the earliest literary works dealing with race and racism. Othello, heroic even if eventually flawed, is the most important black protagonist in early Western literature. Othello faces persistent racism from other characters, in particular when he marries Desdemona, a privileged white woman whose father disapproves of the union.

THE ROYAL BABY

At 4.24 pm on July 22 a baby was born in London. But not just any baby! This baby boy is a prince and will probably one day be the King of England. 

Here you can read an article about Prince William, his beautiful wife Kate Middleton and their son George Alexander Louis.  And don't forget to do the exercises!

HAMLET

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"

Hamlet, Act V, Scene i

Here you can find a thorough analysis of  Shakespeare's most famous tragedy.

IN SEARCH OF SHAKESPEARE'S DARK LADY

Here you can read an interesting and informative article about Shakespeare's "dark lady", the seductive and elusive woman who inspired some of his most famous sonnets.

OLIVER TWIST

Oliver Twist is perhaps Charles Dickens’s most famous novel. It first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later published as a book. The novel fictionalises the economic insecurity and humiliation the novelist  himself experienced when he was a boy.

The novel was the first of the author’s works to realistically depict the impoverished London underworld and to illustrate his belief that poverty leads to crime.

The name Twist, given to the protagonist by accident, represents the disgraceful reversals (=changes) of fortune that he will experience. Oliver Twist is a poor orphan who is brought up in a workhouse in a heartless way,  he is underfed and receives no education.  He is later sold to an undertaker (=funeral director)  as an apprentice, but the cruelty of his new master forces him to run away to London.  There he falls into the hands of a nasty gang of young pickpockets led by Fagin, an old Jew who is one of Dickens’s best characterizations.  They force Oliver to help them in their criminal activities. The boy is temporarily rescued by Mr Brownlow, a benevolent gentleman.  Then Oliver is kidnapped by the gang.  After many incidents,  the gang is  eventually caught by the police.  Mr Brownlow adopts Oliver and shows kindness and affection towards him.

AUGUST

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Classified as a comedy, The Merchant of Venice  can be seen as being part of the group of Shakespearean plays which stand on the borderline between comedy and tragedy. It is not a true tragedy as none of the characters actually die, but it is a dark comedy which deals with some very controversial problems and it is best remembered for the character of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who is portrayed as a greedy, wicked and revengeful individual. Without the Shylock character, however, The Merchant of Venice  might be considered a minor Shakespearean play. No other character (excluding, perhaps, Hamlet) in any of Shakespeare's plays has received as much dispute and commentary about his meaning and interpretation as Shylock.

SHAKESPEARE'S VILLAINS

William Shakespeare created a lot of captivating characters, and most of them are the villains. They show the worst of human characteristics: ambition, jealousy, hatred, resentment, malignity … all of the ugly things that bring out the worst in all of us. In some cases, it is rather disquieting  to think that a fictitious character  can be capable of such horrors. 

COMMEMORATING JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen died this day in 1817. To remember this incomparable writer I suggest reading the short epistolary novel Lady Susan - an early work of Jane Austen that remained unpublished until 1871, when it was included in A Memoir of Jane Austen by Edward Austen-Leigh, her half-brother. It is the story of Lady Susan, a brilliant and stunningly beautiful widow in her upper thirties who is bad to the bone - she enjoys making men fall in love with her, deceiving their wives and tormenting her own daughter, heartlessly bending her to her will. Unlike the women featured in Jane Austen's other works, Lady Susan is an anti-heroine, in fact she is so cold-hearted in her machinations that she puts her own interests ahead of her daughter’s, or anyone else’s for that matter. It is a superbly crafted novel of Regency manners and mores that will delight you with its wit and elegant expression.

SUMMER READING TIPS

One of the best things about the lazy days of summer is having more time to read. It is wonderful to sit outside on a beautiful day, smelling the grass and feeling the breeze, lost in a good book.  I think summer holidays and books should be  inseparable!

Here are some reading tips for your carefree summer days!

What about downloading  The Canterville Ghost? It is one of the most popular short stories by Oscar Wilde, widely adapted for the screen and the stage. 
Then you could download Kate Chopin's short story Désirée’s Baby as well as William Wilson, which is Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous character study of the doppelganger, or double, a theme explored in a similar way by the film Fight Club. 
I could also suggest reading  Henry James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw  -  this is a novella, which means that it is shorter than a traditional novel but focusing on actions of greater scope than the short story.