OK or okay first appeared in print on page two of The Boston Morning Post, then one of the most popular newspapers in the United States. In “Word lovers rejoice as OK celebrates 175 years,” a news dispatch from Agence France-Presse on March 22, 2014, speakers and learners of English were enjoined to take a moment to reflect on “OK” as the most popular word in the English language.
Read Andrew Hadfield’s “What kind of God did Shakespeare believe in?”, a review of David Scott Kastan’s A Will to Believe, in The Irish Times now! What is notable about his plays is their easy acceptance of religious difference.” Says Andrew Hadfield in a review of Kastan’s book in the Maissue of The Irish Times: “(Shakespeare) lived in a time when religion was a communal act, something shared by a group of believers with a common purpose and so part of the stuff of everyday life, not a private belief cut off from the world. No definite conclusion is made by Kastan on these parallels, but he suggests that whatever Shakespeare’s religious leanings were, it is evident that the English playwright valued community at least as much as personal belief. The speculation drew strength from perceived striking parallels of language, idiom, and thought between Shakespeare’s works and de Vere’s own poetry and letters. Kastan points out that so frequently was the question of Shakespeare’s possible Catholicism raised in the popular press that it even managed to quell speculation that he was actually Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in literary disguise. In a recently released book, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (OUP Oxford, 176 pages), David Scott Kastan makes an exploratory overview of the Bard of Avon’s religious beliefs by closely examining the texts of his plays and poems for clues.
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