Blogging Shakespeare

On Monday this week, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust hosted a webinar, ‘Reviewing Shakespeare’, an in-depth discussion I had with Dr Paul Prescott (University of Warwick) about how and why we review Shakespearian productions. What makes a good theatre review? Do we dare to ‘speak what we feel not what we ought to say’? (King Lear, [...]

We are pleased to post the following by Tagore specialist Obhi Chatterjee: 7 May was the 152nd anniversary of the birth of the Bengali creative genius and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. This year is also the centenary of Tagore winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. We celebrated the occasion at Shakespeare’s Birthplace on Saturday afternoon, two [...]

Most of Shakespeare’s aristocratic patrons would be intimately familiar with the arts of swordplay. Furthermore, Shakespeare as a trained actor would have studied fighting accurately to replicate it onstage. This is why Shakespeare takes many opportunities to mention duelling culture in his plays, especially within the comedies.  Shakespeare uses duel references to comic effect in [...]

The eminent theatre historian Allardyce Nicoll founded the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upo-Avon as a postgraduate centre for the study of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. Inheriting the former headquarters of the British Council, Mason Croft, the house that once belonged to the popular novelist Marie Corelli and her partner, Bertha Vyver, the Institute opened in October 1951. [...]

Of the three “problem plays,” Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, with their dark cynicism about sex and politics, seem finally to be coming into their own in our darkly cynical time. Not so All’s Well That Ends Well. All’s Well has been called the comic version of Coriolanus; if nothing else, these are [...]

While Neil Jordan’s The Borgias was rushed into the programming to coincide with the conclave, the new season is set to offer a new multi-episode version of Romeo and Juliet, produced by the largest private broadcasting company, Mediaset (no apparent relationship with the predilection of its owner, a former prime minister, for adolescent girls). However, [...]

At the back of the stage were three panels showing images of old boys from 1913 onwards. I was aware of the St George’s flag being included as part of the design. As I peered more closely, I noticed that some of the photographs of the boys had a similar red cross of St George [...]

The Shakespeare Institute Players present A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare Directed by John Langdon, assisted by Karen Nicholls The Hall of the Shakespeare Institute, Mason Croft, Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon 14, 15, and 16 March 2013 at 7:30pm - Matinée on Saturday 16 at 2:30pm   Tickets are £8 (£6 concessions)  -  Advanced bookings on shakespeareinstituteplayers@gmail.com [...]

On Sunday, 3rd March, University College London’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges will be presenting a performance of  Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra at the Great Hall of Goodenough College. This may well be the first such staging of Daniel’s play in four hundred years and certainly the first in modern times. Published in 1594, Daniel’s tragedy [...]