Blogging Shakespeare

By Layla Moallem Sonnet 130 This single is the outcome of a beautiful encounter between Layla and the highly acclaimed musical producer and Balkan Beat Box founding member Tamir Muskat. What started as an improvised session in Tamir’s studio, in which Layla found herself rapping Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 onto Tamir’s beats – became a long […]

By Kelsey Ridge, University of Birmingham This year, the Globe theatre flourishes its Summer of Love with Matthew Dunster’s Much Ado About Nothing set in 1914 Mexico during the first wave of Mexican revolution.  It’s an overall lively and engaging production which they bill as “a fusion of Latin music, desert flowers and revolutionary politics.”  […]

By Drs Sarah-Jane Fenton, Research Fellow, Mental Health & Wellbeing Unit, Warwick Medical School and Anjna Chouhan, Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.   A Shakespearian Watching Owen Horsley’s Salomé at the Swan was a remarkable experience for two reasons. First, the company was fizzing with a carnal, raw kind of energy that made my stomach churn […]

Making Shakespeare Brand-new: A Tribute to Michael Bogdanov (15 December 1938 – 16 April 2017) by Paul Edmondson I first met Michael Bogdanov in 2008, when he came to take part in a study day on Hamlet at the Shakespeare Centre. He had directed the play five times in a theatrical career that spanned well […]

The Plays We Overlook: The Merry Wives of Windsor By James Cappio Overshadowed by the two parts of Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor starts off unpromisingly. Writers’ manuals always warn fledgling writers not to represent speakers’ accents phonetically. Merry Wives demonstrates that even Shakespeare should heed this advice. His Welsh character, Parson Evans, […]

The Plays We Overlook: The Two Noble Kinsmen By James Cappio Is there any play in the canon less known than The Two Noble Kinsmen? And not just because of what Moe the bartender did to the manuscript in The Simpsons (see illustration). There it is on the title page of the 1634 quarto: “The […]

Shakespeare Out of Europe By Graham Holderness I remember a time when British culture among the educated was thoroughly European. Everyone listened to French music, wore Italian clothes, watched European films, smoked French cigarettes, drank German beer and French and Italian wine. Everyone owned a fondu set, and burned their mouths on hot melted cheese. […]

Doing Shakespeare While Black? By Alexa Alice Joubin Race is an uncomfortable but important topic in our age of globalization. In the art and entertainment industry, race is both visible and invisible in various forms of embodiment. After all, actors embody various characters and stories on stage and on screen, drawing attention to, or away […]

From the 10th to the 13th of April Verona will host a series of events dedicated to both the cultural role of William Shakespeare in Europe and a discussion of Romeo and Juliet within a context of crisis and reconciliation. These events inaugurate a four-year networked project (2013-2016) promoted by The Shakespeare Institute and the […]