Blogging Shakespeare

By Jan Padover Jan Padover, the illustrator for Prospero Art Publishers recently finished an exhibit of his playing card designs at the Nut House Cafe & Gallery in Upplands Väsby, just north of Stockholm. Among the original art shown for the companies many decks, are twenty watercoloured pen & ink drawings done for their Shakespeare […]

by Yang Yu This is my journey in Italy in 1520: As George Wordsworth, plenipotentiary of Cardinal Giulio de’Medici (de facto ruler of Florence who later became Pope Clement VII), I was sent on a mission to Rome, Naples, Venice, Ravenna and Bologna, to grind the bloody Italian War that has been raging since 1494 […]

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 […]