Shakespeare References In Magazines (Columbia Journalism Review and Writer’s Digest)

The July/August 1998 issue of Columbia Journalism Review has one Shakespeare reference. Actually, it’s simply the title of a book that is reviewed in the “Book Reports” section (on page 67). The title is TV Or Not TV: Television, Justice And The Courts, from a book by Ronald L. Goldfarb. The title is obviously a play on Hamlet’s famous speech.

The September/October 1998 issue of Columbia Journalism Review also has a Shakespeare reference. In a section on David Remnick titled “A Remnick Reader,” there is a quoted passage from the preface to The Devil Problem And Other True Stories. That passage includes these lines: “They differ from the novels of, say, Dreiser, or the plays of Shakespeare, in the richness of detail, the complexity of thought and incident, the wealth of language, but in the story of O.J. Simpson (the tabloid story of the millennium) there were surely elements of An American Tragedy and Othello” (page 45).

The November 1992 issue of Writer’s Digest has a couple of Shakespeare references. The first is in a piece on trademark symbols, and is a riff on the first line of Hamlet’s famous speech (see photo).

The second is actually on the same page (page 54), and is in an advertisement for Kelly Services, Inc. The top line is, “What’s in a name?” And then just below that, it says “A Lot…When The Name Is Kelly.” That, of course, is a reference to Juliet’s line from Act II Scene i of Romeo And Juliet: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other word would smell as sweet.” (See photo.)

The May 1993 issue of Writer’s Digest has a Shakespeare reference in an article titled “What’s the Real Story?” In that piece, author Nancy Kress makes a reference to Hamlet. Kress writes: “Other stories raise the dramatic question in the first scene and don’t answer it until the end. A classic example is Hamlet, which has a consistent dramatic question: What is Hamlet going to do about the information given to him by his father’s ghost? We don’t get the full answer until five acts and eight corpses later” (page 11).