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No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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The Third Casket: How Shakespeare Taught Us to Choose the Thing We Cannot Refuse

A man walks into a room and finds three boxes waiting for him. One is gold, one is silver, one is lead. He has been told that his whole life turns on which one he opens, and that the rules forbid him to open more than one. The woman he wants stands beside the boxes, unable to help him, bound by a dead father’s will. This is the casket scene from The Merchant of Venice, and it is one of the strangest moments in Shakespeare, because the test is rigged twice over. It is rigged inside the play, where Portia’s dead father designed the riddle so that only a man who can see past surface will win her. It is rigged outside the play, in the deeper sense Freud uncovered in 1913, where the choice was never free at all, and the man was always going to reach for the box that means his death.

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A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

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The Applause of Fools: How Erasmus Predicted Every Century After His Own

In 1509, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, writing from the restless perch of Thomas More’s London house, composed The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) in the span of roughly a week. The book was a satirical grenade lobbed at the Church, at the academy, at every strutting peacock of European intellectual life who mistook plumage for substance. Among its many surgical observations, one line has outlived them all with terrifying accuracy: “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them.”

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Return of the United Stage!

It’s been a busy month! We buried 2023 and 2024 is now empirically in play for the rest of us! Janna’s new sites — ASL Opera and Jannauary.com — are both now live, as is the new — Boles.ai — website that not only predicts future history but also lives in the present past; but I am most supremely pleased to announce the dramatic return of: The United Stage!

UnitedStage.com

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From Moonbeam to Sunburn

The sun is danger and invective. The moon is hope and narcissism. We turn our eyes to the moon, and we see a man staring back; we turn our heads to the sun and are blinded by the daring. The moon soothes. The sun punishes. The moon beams and becomes us. The sun burns and loathes us. We have dipped a human toe in moon dust. We have now, finally, eyed the fiery sun, up close, but through a glass darkly.

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The Age of Ophelia and the Sticky Transom

We live in The Age of Ophelia and of the sticky transom, and neither of those things are good, or worthy, when day is done. Ophelia is one of the most insipidly sad characters in all of Shakespeare’s greatest works — and in Hamlet, she not only dies a coward’s death — she also deeply burns disappointment into every reader of the play and observer of her character in performance.

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