I would suggest the opening scene of Act 5 is, in and of itself, one of the most devastingly tragic scenes in all of theatre. Shakespeare sets everything up for a dramatic victory at the end of Act 4: Cordelia and husband have arrived with an army and rescued Lear, the antagonistic actions of the other sisters have been exposed, and so on. Then Act 5 opens with a off-stage defeat of the triumphant army that had come to save the day.

Brutal.

How is a heart more universal than a star? Both are pictoral representations that in no way resemble the thing they represent. Stars are giant balls of energy that illuminate the universe, not five pointed yellow things, and hearts (in humans) are more like this:

I wonder if the symbol for the heart and star in other countries prior to the internet and globalization and all that even remotely resembled the 5 pointed star we all know and the “less than three” shaped dohicky used for a heart.

Also, restaurants are awarded three Michelin Stars; the best hotels are four star hotels; movie critics give films up to five stars.

Damn – Kanye being all thoughtful.

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
–The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, S.T. Coleridge.

Likely a Coleridge reference, especially since Jens is then ridiculed with the lines:

I’m Jens. Water bores me. I’m a poet.

and

Is Jens a poet? Are you still a poet, Jens?

The poet mentions, which Jens never answers, are reinforced with the Catullus reference and stereotypical behavior of Jens as a sort of playboy poet in the vein of Catullus, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Hart Crane, among others.

Pretty sure this is supposed to be Catullus, the famous Roman poet. (Shame on you, Kenyon Review, for letting this slip through. )

Catullus died a young death (St. Jerome put the age at 30 saying he lived from 87 BC to 57 BC; the scholarly consensus suggests 84 BC to 54 BC), was quite a playboy and while he’s never been considered a canonical writer, he’s been studied and written about essentially since his death. Catullus’s poems were usually about his friends and what they were doing, much like this story, but invoked other things. Catullus’s social group seemed to only be concerned with love and poetry – but Catullus, while certainly concerned with those things, also insulted his contemporary political leaders (and their ideologies) in explicit and surprising ways.

The early Catullus reference seems to draw a parallel between Jens’s life and Catullus’s. Catullus was very explicit in his work and Jens says things like “Remember when I was the biggest thing to pass through that vagina of yours?”

Hart Crane was compared to Catullus by Robert Lowell in “Words for Hart Crane” – due to Hart Crane’s similarly tumultuous and turgid life.

No kidding! Midleton single malt, at its cheapest, starts at about $184.60 (€150.00 at time of writing). Their stuff that isn’t single malt is a little cheaper but not much.