Shakespearean Sequel

http://cathasach71854.googlepages.com/love%27slaborswon

The Best Soviet Poet

http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/demo/poetpage/mayakovsky.html
http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/mayakovsky.htm

Mayakovsky was arguably one of the best Russian poets, and was so in the Pushkin tradition. A convinced Soviet, he was also one of their fiercest and inspired critics, and his propaganda never destroyed his lyricism. Pasternak wrote that he inflated his talent and tortured it until it burst - disdaining to play a role in life, he played the character of Life itself. Ultimately, his contradictions lead to suicide. But not before he had effortlessly produced some of the best Russian Futuristic verse. Mayakovsky was no cynic and no compromiser. He may not have been a nice guy, and he was certainly strange, but I recommend his Cloud in Pants. He missed his time period of birth, for he would have been much at home in Putin's Russian Federation. Indeed, much of Mayakovsky's verse has a watery or windy element to it, a push to the future that may be. He seems to have been made, as Charles Baudelaire was, in the old mold, and definitely out of his sphere among the relatively degraded characters he had to associate with. His sentiments were from the old liberal era of the 18th century, combined with a relish for change and human progress.

Shakespearean Comedies

Shakespeare
Item I: Known for his tragedies. These I find hard to separate from pictures of European actors with pasty white faces and long, puffy wigs embracing each other, brandishing daggers either in their hands or in their hearts. As the philosopher John Evans said, it's hard to defend a culture whose apex of human development was unisex fancy costumes and effeminacy. In short, the touch of the velveteen dandyfop attends even my favorite tragedy, the one most heavily endorsed by the night-haunted and moon-haunted lyrical Germans, the sweet prince of Hamlet.
Item II: No one appreciates his comedies. This I intend to remedy, and that right swiftly, in what power of the moment is granted. Take Twelfth Night: The last song of the comedy is worth the price of admission alone. You can't beat Ben Kingsley as Festae the Clown. It's like passing up a command performance by Ben Cross.
More anon...

Tristam Shandy

I would like to recommend one of the best written pieces of English prose (stylistically) I have come across in a long time. It also happens to be highly amusing, as well as packed with worldly (in the good old practical sense) wisdom for the overly naive. Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy is part of that stream of beautiful English inaugurated by Chaucer, continued through Shakespeare, and kept up in our own day and time by such writers as Tolkien or Churchill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Shandy
http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/oct2000.html
Sterne is in the Roman comedic tradition, and while not necessarily very Christian in an explicit way, reflects a Christened Imperial tradition that we can enjoy.

Shakespeare

hthttp://www.geocities.com/litpageplus/shakmoul_loveslaborslost.html
Some thoughts on Love's Labors Lost over the years. Perhaps a consensus?
http://www.fandm.edu/x9633.xml
And, of course, someone beat me to it. Nevertheless, I shall eclipse her.
The project was back in the halcyon days of irresponsibility, reading through all the Shakespeare I had missed out on in college and high school. I wrote it in the first flush of romantic love for my wife, when we were "a-courting", and, aware that the harshest critics of love literature are those who aren't currently in love, I shall rewrite the play before I publish it through Lulu. I want to include about twenty Shakespearean sonnets (or maybe more) at the end, as well as an essay on Why Read Shakespeare? and another introduction to Love's Labors Lost (an attempt to revive appreciation for this neglected play). Who knows? I may also get some commentary from Dorothy Louise, who also wrote a sequel.
The original play is half a play (a long play halved), and deserves a finish. My sequel envisions a real change in the Romantic Lovers, who return after one year much the wiser for their travel through the world and their vows of poverty. The sequel deceptively picks up where Shakespeare left off, with the women in command, but is actually an inversion of the first, for it is the men who will set the tone of the second sequel - humbled and wiser, and therefore deceptively submissive to the will of the women. Dumaine, in fact, is seriously ill with melancholy, and the sequel hinges around his religious depression caused by the evil he has witnessed in the world and his crisis of faith. Although the women get their wish, seeing their suitors reduced and humble to their vow, it is more than they have bargained for.
I have retained the comedy of the first, but tried to temper it into something more like its better self. You have to go to hell before you get to heaven.
The entire book is a Festschrift to Romantic Love, which is not a bad thing, maybe the best of things, when it is transformed into Realistic Love based upon character and vows. Thus, the men have transformed into those who keep their vows and even small promises given offhand, even if it means losing their lady.
http://www.poster.com.pl/shakespeare.htm
http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/exhibition/NSC/NSC%20large%20images/poster4.html