Shakespeare was a genius. His plots may have been stolen, his knowledge of the worlds about which he wrote flawed and incomplete, but his poetry and his genius as a weaver of narrative threads is unsurpassed, even four hundred years later. How was it that a provincial glover’s son born in the early years of
The term “Renaissance Man” is a reasonably well known one, which draws a pretty wide set of definitions but which basically refers to someone who is accomplished in multiple fields seen as desirable by their peers and superiors. This, both in the Renaissance and the modern day, is a big ask. It comes with assumptions
In 1912 a Polish book dealer came across a manuscript which, at first glance, did not seem to be that out of the ordinary. Composed of roughly 240 pages of vellum, it was apparently a remnant of a larger whole with more than 30 pages missing. What remained appears to be a medical text of