Shakespeare References in Mind Game

Mind Game: How The Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won A World Series, And Created A New Blueprint For Winning contains a few Shakespeare references. The first comes on the first page of the acknowledgments. Editor Steven Goldman writes, "Not only did Jonah Keri contribute three chapters, despite having just finished his own grueling work as co-editor of Baseball Prospectus 2005, but he acted as Horatio to my Hamlet (or maybe that's Jester to my Lear), offering assistance, guidance, sagacity, and even some tough love at key moments" (p. vii). Then on the first page of the first chapter there is another Shakespeare reference: "The White Sox have not only waited longer, but carry a burden of a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, that of the manipulated, manipulating Black Sox of 1919" (p. 1). There is also a reference to The Tempest: "Since 2000, however, there has been a sea change in pitchers' workloads" (p. 86). The phrase "sea change" comes from Ariel's song, in which he sings, "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change." The final reference is to Falstaff's famous line from The First Part Of King Henry The Fourth: "On a rational basis, though, with millions and millions of dollars at stake, another eighty-six games to run in the schedule, and the Yankees nearly certain of a return to the postseason, a little discretion can buy a lot of later valor" (p. 156). Falstaff says, "The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life."

This book was published in 2005.

Shakespeare Reference in Summer Of '49

David Halberstam's book about the 1949 baseball season focusing on the Red Sox and Yankees, Summer Of '49, contains a Shakespeare reference. It comes in a passage quoted from Red Smith, regarding the change television brought to the game: "Today, conscious of the great unseen audience, they [the umpires] play every decision out like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. On a strike they gesticulate, they brandish a fist aloft, they spin almost as shot through the heart, they bellow all four parts of the quartette from Rigoletto" (p. 229).

This book was published in 1989. The first Perennial Classics edition was published in 2002, and the copy I read was from reissue in Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 2006.

Shakespeare Reference in Here Beside The Rising Tide

Jim Newton's Here Beside The Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, And An American Wakening contains a reference to Macbeth. In the chapter that tackles 1967 and the band's first album, Newton writes: "To Lesh, the album felt like 'sound and fury buried in a cavern'" (p. 130). So, yeah, the Macbeth reference actually comes from Phil Lesh's Searching For The Sound, quoted here. Anyway, "sound and fury" is a phrase used in what is probably my favorite speech in all of Shakespeare's work. The speech ends with these lines: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." In the Notes section at the back of the book, Jim Newton says where the quote comes from : "'sound and fury buried in a cavern': Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound, p. 99" (p. 465).

Here Beside The Rsing Tide: Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, And An American Wakening was published in 2025. The copy I read was an advanced uncorrected proofs edition, in paperback.