Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

There has been considerable debate around the idea that William Shakepspeare in some minor way helped to translate for the 1611 version of the King James Bible.  Regardless of the veracity of this claim, there is far more, and safer, evidence to suggest that he certainly would've known the Bible narrative very well, as would all of his educated contemporaries. Several years ago, I decided to read the Bible in a year.  It occurred to me somewhere around the story of Samuel, Saul and David that a lot of biblical narrative, some incredibly similar, had managed to make its way into the Bard's tales.  I started keeping a chart.  Below are my findings (unfortunately rather sketchy, in no particular order and having no particular method of organization):                          Bible Shakespeare Esther 1:10-12 – King Xer...

This is very strange. Sitting in a Starbucks in Buffalo, NY.  Waiting for my nephew to fly in from California.  "I'll Fly Away" is playing. It's an old time gospel song.  I remember playing on the same stage as a gospel quartet... gotta be six or seven years ago now. They called us back on the stage to sing it with them for the finale.  I'd never played it, but I stumbled through it okay. Crazy when you try to call back moments like that.  It was late summer.  Somewhere around Paris, Ontario.  Braeside: where there was a Pentecostal Family Camp.  We played several week-long kids' camps in previous summers and were called back to do a singles group.  Yup.  We did children's music and slapstick and we were called back to share the stage with a preacher and a gospel quartet.  Audience: single adults.  We learned pretty early in our musical career to just go with the flow. It's a pretty cool version, this banjo, blue grass...

For several years, as a high school English teacher, one of my favourite units to teach was Aristotle’s Poetics .   This short and ancient book is the bible of storytelling.   It’s still so relevant today that, in Hollywood, one of the hottest ticket for aspiring film writers is *Robert McKee’s Story Seminar which is his take on successful scriptwriting based on Poetics .   McKee’s approach has since been adopted by novelists, comic book writers and story-tellers from many other genres. Do you remember the plot graph from grade 9 English?   Inciting Incident, rising action, complications due to inciting incident, reversal, climax, and denouement… Is that all ringing a bell?   The terminology has changed over the years, but it all started with Aristotle, 450 BC.   Or at least, Aristotle was the first to commit it to parchment.   I’m sure that there were ancients telling stories orally and that the best ones followed the same intuitive rules later es...