If you have already had the good fortune of encountering “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespearew1-sledpg, you were probably at a wedding.
It is not, by most accounts, a sexy poem. It is not exactly a happy one, either. Instead, it celebrates commitment to devotion: “Love’s not time’s fool,” perhaps its most famous phrase, is held up as a toast to living together and aging together. It is one of the poems that, however often it is read aloud, still pricks tear ducts and quiets fidgets.
But during the English Civil Wars in the mid-1600s, the poem may have had a different resonance.
That’s, at least, according to research published last month in The Review of English Studies by an Oxford researcher, Leah Veronese,89vip slots who found a rare, handwritten version in an archive.
aj-christmaspgSuch discoveries are rare. “It’s incredibly exciting when somebody finds any manuscript trace of Shakespeare’s poems,” said a Columbia University professor, James Shapiro, an expert on Shakespeare who was not involved in the find.
And experts are celebrating the discovery as an early example of the ways that Shakespeare’s work has been adapted to meet a charged moment.
“Shakespeare has always been political,” Professor Shapiro said, adding, “People repurposed it in their own day — as in ours — for different political ends.”
On Monday and Wednesday, the deaths of two mothers in Georgia were linked to the state’s far-reaching abortion ban in new reports from ProPublica.
The data suggests that some of the tools used to combat opioid overdoses, such as naloxone, the overdose-reversing medication, were having a significant impact. But researchers and federal and state health officials have puzzled over the exact reasons for the decrease, including why overdoses have fallen so much in recent months.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.w1-sledpg
