Blogging Shakespeare

Shakespeare and Still Photography I am delighted to be awarded the Louis Marder Scholarship by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. My PhD research on ‘Shakespeare and Still Photography’ relies heavily on access to performance archives, and the scholarship will allow me take full advantage of the Shakespeare Centre Archive, particularly, its formidable collections of photographs dating [...]

Taking up from where the recent Sonnets for Advent series finished comes this post by painter Richard Lance Russell: This painting, “Number All Your Graces,” was inspired by these lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17: “If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces” I love creating paintings [...]

Last weekend I had the pleasure of speaking to The German Shakespeare Society in Weimar. Their conference was on the Sonnets. Professor Dympna Callaghan of Syracuse University, New York was also among the specially invited speakers. Weimar is an extraordinary place and exudes literature, art, philosophy and music from its very fabric. There was a [...]

“England. Be it known that William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death…”. King’s Bench, Controlment Roll, Michaelmas Term 1596, K.B. 29/234: In the England of 1596 those fearful of “death or mutilations” could appeal to the judicial process to head off a potential attack. In [...]

On the evening of the 17th of November this year, the RSC will perform Redcrosse in Coventry Cathedral. Partly an original arts event, partly a groundbreaking religious service, Redcrosse evolves out of a project I led to evolve a new questing liturgy for England and St George. It was inspired by one of the great [...]

Well, he doesn’t have a background in film-making for nothing… In this video, actor and artist Garrick Huscared is joined by fellow artist, Jude Methuen, who worked in the R.S.C.’s prop department for many years. There isn’t anything Jude can’t make! Their quest to make a new bust of Shakespeare has also led to Garrick [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen. The exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World focuses on Shakespeare’s ‘world rather than his life’. Droeshout’s image of Shakespeare looms over the ticket booking process, the programme, and the entrance to the [...]

Today I went to meet Garrick Huscared at the studio where he and Jude Methuen have been working on the new bust. It’s a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon and like most artists’ homes feels like a place where people easily understand one another. It was good to revisit the Cobbe Portrait and the Droeshout engraving [...]

National Theatre Wales (Co-produced by RSC) Dir. Mike Pearson & Mike Brookes. Hangar 858, RAF St. Athan, Vale of Glamorgan. 8-18th August 2012. Review by Harry Fox Davies, Goldsmiths, University of London. At about twenty-five past seven on a cool midweek night in August I was part of a group of around three hundred people [...]