one stupid thing and one cool thing
The stupid thing, courtesy of my dad via email and J on facebook: SCOTUS full of Oxfordians, film at 11. Because serving on the nation's highest court doesn't guarantee you know anything about literary history.
The cool thing, courtesy of tekalynn: Excerpts from the work of an anonymous diarist who recorded the efforts of New York shopkeepers to memorialize Abraham Lincoln in the days following his assassination. There's a slightly longer article here, but the actual excerpts are all in the first link.
The comparisons to the reactions to 9/11 virtually write themselves, of course, but another thing I found interesting (in the sense of "would write a conference paper if I knew more about how 19th-century Americans read Shakespeare") was the use of Shakespeare in these memorials. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's quite a bit of it, and the choices of passages are interesting. There are a few from King John (a much more popular play then than it is now), such as this one and this one, both expressions of horror at the death of Prince Arthur. Macbeth is also popular, with its passages on the murder of Duncan (here and, at greater length, here), while Ross's comment on young Siward appears twice. And of course Hamlet's remembrance of his dead father makes an appearance.
Julius Caesar is also particularly well-represented -- there are a few that quote Antony's "Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood" (see also here), and another one cites the final lines of the play in which Antony, somewhat disingenuously, eulogizes Brutus ("and say to all the world, 'This was a man!'"). This last is a bit unsettling when you know, as these grief-stricken New Yorkers had yet to learn, that John Wilkes Booth strongly identified with Brutus (it was a role he had played several times, and his words upon shooting Lincoln, "Sic semper tyrannis," were attributed to the historical Brutus after stabbing Julius Caesar). I can't help but remember a couple of talks I've heard on Shakespeare in 18th/19th-c America which both suggested that early(ish) American Shakespeare reception illustrated the point that Shakespeare is popular because he can be used to support just about any ideology...
The cool thing, courtesy of tekalynn: Excerpts from the work of an anonymous diarist who recorded the efforts of New York shopkeepers to memorialize Abraham Lincoln in the days following his assassination. There's a slightly longer article here, but the actual excerpts are all in the first link.
The comparisons to the reactions to 9/11 virtually write themselves, of course, but another thing I found interesting (in the sense of "would write a conference paper if I knew more about how 19th-century Americans read Shakespeare") was the use of Shakespeare in these memorials. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's quite a bit of it, and the choices of passages are interesting. There are a few from King John (a much more popular play then than it is now), such as this one and this one, both expressions of horror at the death of Prince Arthur. Macbeth is also popular, with its passages on the murder of Duncan (here and, at greater length, here), while Ross's comment on young Siward appears twice. And of course Hamlet's remembrance of his dead father makes an appearance.
Julius Caesar is also particularly well-represented -- there are a few that quote Antony's "Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood" (see also here), and another one cites the final lines of the play in which Antony, somewhat disingenuously, eulogizes Brutus ("and say to all the world, 'This was a man!'"). This last is a bit unsettling when you know, as these grief-stricken New Yorkers had yet to learn, that John Wilkes Booth strongly identified with Brutus (it was a role he had played several times, and his words upon shooting Lincoln, "Sic semper tyrannis," were attributed to the historical Brutus after stabbing Julius Caesar). I can't help but remember a couple of talks I've heard on Shakespeare in 18th/19th-c America which both suggested that early(ish) American Shakespeare reception illustrated the point that Shakespeare is popular because he can be used to support just about any ideology...