Was too busy last week to post much, so I missed talking about Mercy Sunday, which happened to fall on Shakespeare's birthday, which would have been worth discussing too. Ninme found this nice little piece in the Telegraph documenting that pretty much all clichés in English (that don't come from Scripture) come from Shakespeare. The author writes:
No writer is so catholic in his appeal.
Possibly because he was himself Catholic? The thesis asserts itself from time to time, and while I admit I'd love it to be true, I've never found the evidence very persuasive. But there's an article available here (Fall/Winter 2005 issue), which argues that Merchant of Venice is a reference to the underground Jesuits' habit of referring to each other in letters as "merchants" and that the "pound of flesh" is token of the Eucharist.
