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Kit Harington has signed on to star in a new theatrical production of Doctor Faustus. Harington has become well-known for playing Jon Snow on the Game of Thrones HBO series.

Here’s more from The Daily Mail: “Doctor Faustus is about a physician who makes a pact, in blood, with the devil. Lucifer gets the Doctor’s soul. But for 24 years, Faustus gets infinite knowledge and the chance to indulge in any and every fantasy he desires. He becomes well acquainted with the Seven Deadly Sins in the process.”

Deadline reports that the show will open on Apr. 9 at the Duke of York Theatre; this venue can be found in the West End within London. Christopher Marlowe published The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus play back in 1604. Click here to download a free digital copy of this work.

Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w

Title page of the earliest published text of Edward II (1594) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’ve come back to Two-For-Tuesday on Poetic Asides. This morning’s prompt calls for a poem about a Forest and one about a Tree.

Pastoral poetry has a long history around the world, both as metaphor and as observational verse. The Poetry Foundation says this about this verse form.

Verse in the tradition of Theocritus (3 BCE), who wrote idealized accounts of shepherds and their loves living simple, virtuous lives in Arcadia, a mountainous region of Greece. Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and Sir Walter Ralegh’s response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The pastoral poem faded after the European Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, but its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world; see Leonie Adams’s“Country Summer,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wales Visitation.”Browse more pastoral poems.

Some of us continue to write about those sublime, still pools populated with lilies like freckles on a lady’s cheek. We enjoy finding new and different ways to express the feeling experienced within the deep woods while spring rains moisturize the earth and wild ginger puts out its sweet scent to rival the subtle hint of redbud blossoms and dogwood earthiness.

There are also cowboys out there who produce some terrific verse about life on the plain, gardeners who speak to their labors and rewards, and fishermen who wax eloquent about reeling in hard and losing face and fish at the last second.

Verse about nature themes, love, and virtues could blanket the earth several times over if stretched end to end and side by side. Poets w

By Stanley Wells

The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male. Nevertheless none are explicitly homoerotic in the manner of some of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton, or for that matter of some modern poets such as W. H. Auden or Thom Gunn.

All those that are clearly addressed to or written about a young man, or “boy,” are among the first 126 to be printed in the 1609 volume. Yet Number 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment ….,” one of the most famous love poems in the language, is frequently read at heterosexual weddings. And other poems in the first part of the sequence – such as Number 27 – could even be love poems addressed to the poet’s wife.

Shakespeare’s most idealized sonnets fall among those that are either clearly addressed to a male, or are non-specific in their addressee. His explicitly sexual sonnets, all concerned with a woman and all among the last 26 to be printed, suggest severe psychological tension in a man who has to acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it, at least in its current manifestation. An example is Number 147, which begins:

My love is as a fever, longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.

None of the poems that celebrate love between the poet (whether we think of him simply as an identity assumed by Shakespeare for professional purposes or as Shakespeare speaking in his own person) and a “lovely boy” is explicitly sexual in the manner of the frankest of the “dark lady” sonnets. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers. They have also met with castigation from homophobic readers for this very reason, as the history of their reception over the centuries makes abundantly clear. And a number of the sonnets addressed to a male are deeply passionate if idealized love poems which one can easily imagine being addressed to a young man with whom the poet was having a physical as well as a spiritual relationship. Consider for example Number 108:

What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or my dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet like prayers divine
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show

My Poetry Friday offering this week is celebrating two birthdays. February 26 was the birthday of playwright, Christopher Marlowe and the following is from his Doctor Faustus:

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
And all is dross that is not Helena:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea I will wound Achillis in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.


And February 27 was the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and is apt for those who are experiencing winter weather. I personally have no liking for snow, except when seen at a distance, but this is a gorgeous poem.

Snow-Flakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair.
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

(And yes, if you take note of these things, my Poetry Friday offerings are getting earlier and earlier in the day ! Who needs sleep ?)