billybookblog

*contains spoilers* This bounteous collection of stories, both classical and contemporary (for the age in which it was written, which was circa 1351; their contemporary is relatively classical to us, of course), both noble and bawdy, both comedic and tragic, is one of my favourite reads to date. The Decameron takes its name from the Greek for ‘ten days’, and does what it says on the tin, in providing ten stories told by ten people over the course of ten days – notably in a pastoral landscape. Written in the Italian vernacular in prose form, which allows Boccaccio the scope to explore a wealth of tales without compromising the nitty-gritty details, it affords us readers a magnified look at the context in which the piece was written; warts and all. In the introduction, here called the ‘Author’s Foreword’, Boccaccio even begs the pardon of the faint-hearted women reading, and does so again in his closing ‘Author’s Afterword’ – but don’t worry, women are presented as both noble and strong...

*contains spoilers* There is something about The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha that will resonate with us lovers of books willing enough to pick up thick tomes such as this in the first place: he absolutely loves books – the chivalric tales of knights errant, specifically. As each of these pages is folded over and over, and as each tale winds its way through towns, plains, forests, and fields, Don Quixote teaches us about the knights of old, such as Amadis of Gaul, and the romanticism of a bygone literary era. Don Quixote is, of course, a madman. On reading all of his beloved chivalric tales in the stacks of volumes he keeps at his house, he decides one day to pull together a rusty and haphazard armour, dons it, mounts his scabby horse, Rocinante, employs a local idiot farmer, Sancho Panza as his squire, and they all set off on their adventures. The world into which these two fantastic characters ride is astonished by them, almost as much as they are by it; some of the wor...

*contains spoilers* Arden, the forest to which the Duke and his people are banished at the very beginning of this play, has something about it that resembles the Eden from which Adam and Eve were also banished in the anonymous work of fiction, The Bible (ha!). Of course, we see all sorts of biblical (as well as classical) allusions in what I believe to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, As You Like It , as the beloved characters ponder the nature of life, death, family, enemies, wisdom, folly and the self – just like many do in those classical and biblical stories of old, including in this list Shakespeare’s greatest work, Hamlet. There are no ponderings on the whys and wherefores of flesh and being whilst holding aloft skulls of long lost beloved fools, but there are moments of reflection on the cycle of life itself, and most notably the stages of growth and the acquisition of wisdom or descent into folly. Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most prominent leading female character (she sa...