Blogging Shakespeare

By Stephen H. Grant On the Ides of March five years ago, Johns Hopkins University Press released Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, the first biography written about the founders of the Folger Shakespeare Library. During the research phase in which I visited 35 archives in the US and UK, I put […]

By David Chandler, Retrospect Opera. 2019 will witness the 250th anniversary of David Garrick’s great Shakespeare ‘Jubilee’, the most talked about cultural event of the British eighteenth century. This took place at Stratford-upon-Avon, amidst an unprecedented blaze of publicity, between 6 and 8 September 1769. The series of events leading to the Jubilee began in […]

By Dr. John Langdon We have just reached that point where latest night bleeds into earliest morning.  A man paces restlessly in a tent in the middle of a military encampment, all his companions long since asleep.  The crucial battle looms ahead of him, and his mind won’t let him rest.  Doubts surround his noblest […]

By Diane Meyer Lowman (The Shakespeare Institute, UoB). I have loved Shakespeare for as long as I can remember. Some might say I’m obsessed. So when my boys grew and flew, and I needed to occupy myself and stave off the impending midlife crisis, I got busy with the Bard. I’d flirted with him in […]

By Sara Marie Westh I am back, with another question from the Halliwell-Phillipps notebooks for our brilliant readers to ponder, since the last query yielded such a wealth of suggestions. Once again, my thanks to you all for your help as archival detectives extraordinaire. To the present matter: I keep coming across “cur.” in the marginal […]

By Daisy Edwards, Bootleg Puppets When I became a University student I slowly forgot how desperately young people, families, and children needed art and theatre. Theatre was so accessible as a student, our University had five different drama societies each focussed on a different aspect of the craft there were opportunities for open mic nights, auditions, […]

By Sara Marie Westh I have over the past half year or so been working my way through the J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps notebook on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archives. As you can imagine, puzzling out the notes of another person, notes compiled more than a century ago, and a vast amount of […]

By Sara Marie Westh The images from Peter Brook’s cinematic version of King Lear have been burned onto the retinas of countless Shakespeareans since its release in 1971. The stark landscape of the movie shows a world of mercilessly open space where a grey sky pushes a dark ground down. The beings that people this bleak […]

By Kelsey Ridge, the Shakespeare Institute. I was drawn to Gemma Bodinetz’s Othello at Liverpool’s Everyman largely for its high-concept approach: Othello (played by Golda Rosheuvel) is a lesbian.  An Othello with a lesbian Othello and bisexual Desdemona is one I believe can illuminate the text’s issues and is one I have wanted to see […]