From Christopher Booker’s ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ (2004) to the variously attributed assertion that ‘all great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town’, I have found it fascinating to consider to what degree we can abstract general narratives from literature. Recently, though, I’ve begun to believe that there is really only one story…
Continue reading “Seven Plots, Two Stories or One Archetypal Narrative?”
Macbeth is a play seldom associated with beauty; but having recently picked it up again, I have been blown away by just how beautifully written and structured it is. Admittedly it’s a rather horrific beauty, but still…
Continue reading “The Beauty of Macbeth”
A former mentor of mine at Lancaster University posed a question via Twitter: What does Shakespeare mean to you? I couldn’t possibly let the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s death pass without a post, and I thought that this would be a great question to answer. Continue reading “What does Shakespeare mean to me?”
Jonny English 