Blogging Shakespeare

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, [...]

Polonious. [...] What do you read, my lord? Hamlet. Words, words, words. (Hamlet, 2. 2. 191-192). In the late nineties, as a student of English Language and Literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, I had the honour to attend a couple of courses which were held by Agostino Lombardo, Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of [...]

On 17 February 1600 the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori, today one of the most colourful squares in Rome. A former Dominican friar born near Naples, this wandering intellectual disseminated his revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. He studied in Geneva and Toulouse, taught at Wittenberg (Hamlet’s alma mater, remember?), [...]

For one day Anonymous Venetian was neither the heart-rending film with Tony Musante and Florinda Bolkan nor one of Donna Leon’s great mysteries, but the premiere of Roland Emmerich’s anti-Shakespearian would-be blockbuster. Ca’Foscari University of Venice was given the privilege of the first Italian showing, and the house Shakespearians volunteered a round-table on the authorship [...]

My Shakespearean tour of Venice usually starts in Campo dei Carmini, in the district of Dorsoduro, where the nineteenth-century erudite Rawdon Brown located the “house of Othello”. The palace belonged at some stage to a family called Guoro, that may have been misread as Moro (“Moor”). The tantalizing elements for Brown were probably the statue [...]

Shaul Bassi’s fascinating account of ‘Walking Shakespeare’s Venice’ plays with an ambivalence that is as fascinating and dangerous, seductive and treacherous as Venice herself is so often portrayed in literature and film. He acknowledges that there is no evidence of Shakespeare ever having been in Venice. But he still wants Shakespeare to have been there, [...]

The 4th of September 2011 is the European Day of Jewish Culture  and it looks like the perfect day to visit the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, where several events will take place. Although Shakespeare never mentions this place in The Merchant of Venice, historically speaking this would have been the only area where a 16th-century [...]

In the run-up to The Ninth World Shakespeare Congress in Prague I posted a selection of blogs from grant winners looking forward to that event. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting a selection of blogs from some  more of those grant winners, giving a taste of the papers they presented at [...]

Today it is hot, humid and overcast in Venice. Fewer people are tempted by the beach so the tourists flood the streets even more than usual, and I wade through the throng to find an answer to a question that Shakespeare must have asked himself four centuries ago. If Othello is “the Moor of Venice”, [...]