Julia Lacey Brooke

As 21st Century scholars, we probably go along with Edmund's idea of free-will, although he is ironic about this, and seems to blame or excuse his evil nature on a destiny equally beyond his...

The aunt is a kill-joy, a spoil-sport. We are not told this directly, but can infer it from her of habit of devising 'treats' for the children, for the sole purpose of excluding one or all of them...

Well, of course this short scene does serve as 'comic relief', but it also serves as a dramatic 'hook' between the end of the last Act (2, iii) - Othello and Desdemona's wedding night - and the...

The Cratchit family represent the 'real life' people to whom Scrooge could be kind and charitable, which for Dickens in this novel is a time of giving and generosity more than a Christian religious...

All very nasty! Traditionally, when corpses were prepared for the grave, coins were placed on the closed eyelids and a bandage placed round the chin to keep the eyes and jaw closed during the...

First performed in 1610, Jonson's satire of human materialism was set in then contemporary London. There are therefore a great many characters and themes which the original audience would have...

Dramatic monologues often reveal a great deal about the speaker, and often refer to actions, either obliquely or directly. Another poem you might refer to for comparison is Browning's 'Porphyria's...

While I think we can assume that this poem does express its author's feelings about (and attitudes to) life, death and possibly betrayal, I would suggest a small caveat. When writers -even ones as...

'Witches' is ambiguous. Confusion has largely arisen because the Folio text refers to them in stage directions and speech prefixes as 'witches'. They call themselves the 'Weird Sisters' and Banquo...

The chief device--which is an element of plot mechanism--employed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 is conflict. The poet loves the 'master-mistress' of his passion, but because, as the poem develops, we...