Sunday, April 24, 2016

Words, words, words: Nine years of blog posts on Shakespeare as a crime writer

Photo by Peter Rozovsky
The 400th anniversary this week of William Shakespeare's death has crime readers and writers remarking on similarities between Shakespeare's work and crime fiction. Here are links to some posts I've made on that subject over the years.

Some of the posts sound the standard Shakespeare-crime themes, mainly that lots of people die by foul means in the plays. Another explores Shakespeare's use of repetition to build tension in Hamlet. One post I especially like discusses a 17th-century criticism of Shakespeare that sounds like a 20th-century criticism of Mickey Spillane or a 21st-century knock on noir.
Sarah Bernhardt
as Hamlet

  1. "Hamlet, our crime fiction contemporary"
  2. "Words, words, words"
  3. "Jeopardy! catches up to Detectives Beyond Borders, then gets one of its own questions wrong"
  4. "A bit more from a great seventeenth-century crime writer"
  5. "Bill Shakespeare, sleuth / A question for readers"
  6. "Critic blasts crime fiction for lacking ontological scrutiny"
  7. "An English writer's Scottish crime story," and my favorite of the bunch, a post in which
  8. I catch Samuel Johnson out for an erroneous Shakespeare attribution in his Dictionary of the English Language.
© Peter Rozovsky 2016

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2 Comments:

Blogger RTD said...

Fascinating! Thanks for the posting and links. I touched upon Shakespeare the other day at one of my posts with a questions (intending to stump blog visitors): How many murders are there in all of Shakespeare's plays? I've had no one make a guess.

Confession: I do not know the answer, but I am tempted to go through Shakespeare with a fine-tooth comb, play-by-play in order to sleuth out the answer.

But you might save me some time if you already know. So, how many murders? Hmmmm?

April 25, 2016  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

Ay, caramba! I have no idea.

April 25, 2016  

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