Blogging Shakespeare

‘Romeo loved Juliet Juliet she felt the same When he put his arms around her He said ‘Julie, baby, you’re my flame Thou giv-est fever when we kisseth Fever with the flaming youth Fever I’m afire Fever yea I burn for sooth’ Elvis Presley would have sung these lyrics about Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers hundreds of […]

As we leave the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival I look across Kansas City to the trees lying beyond the skyscrapers. The Winter’s Tale which we saw in Southmoreland Park feels like it is sending its city beat onto the road in front of us. We are at once driving away from and heading towards […]

We’ve had a terrific and enjoyably intense first full day, thanks in no small part to the orchestrative efforts of Artistic Director Sidonie Garrett, a force of nature and of culture, and someone who is bound to feature again on this site. We conducted fourteen interviews with people associated with the Heart of America Shakespeare […]

Colorado from the air looks like a state of enormous fields in which nothing much seems to happen. Mountains decorate the horizon, staring reproachfully at the well organised emptiness in front of them. We are finally on our way to Kansas City, only twenty-four hours later than planned and having travelled an extra 2,500 miles. […]

As we descended into Newark yesterday afternoon – blithely unaware that the forerunning tempests stirred by Hurricane Arthur had caused our connecting flight to be cancelled, and that we would spend the night not in Kansas City, as planned, but at the Kenilworth Inn, Kenilworth, New Jersey – our irrepressible attendant announced that we should […]

The 4th July is upon on us, and I’ve just landed in Kansas City for the start of Shakespeare on the Road, an epic road trip all around North America which aims to tell the story of the extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespeare festival. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has teamed up with the University of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Pericles has a claim to be Shakespeare’s most overlooked play. Nonprofessional Shakespeareans are likely never to have seen, read, or even heard of it. It is among the last plays to have entered the canon. The text is notoriously corrupt. And the consensus that it is a collaboration is among the firmest for any of […]