Blogging Shakespeare

Last spring we launched A Year of Shakespeare – an energetic record and review of all 73 productions which took place in the World Shakespeare Festival. Today, those reviews, by 30 international contributors, are published as A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival. It’s well illustrated and represents another innovation from Bloomsbury publishing [...]

  February 4 And now.   The play has been read. It’s so compact! It’s so complete!  Each line is so…significant! So…powerful!   Calm down.  Yes, it’s a powerful play. More so with each reading. So what else is new?   The available spin-offs have been watched, some not previously seen. Star Trek?? Oh yes. [...]

It’s a week before the celebration of Valentine’s Day, and many romantic suitors will be rushing to the florist to impress the objects of their affection with bountiful bouquets. While some may be primarily concerned with the aesthetic appeal of the flowers or if the blooms will break the bank, Shakespeare was well aware of [...]

Hamlet is scary. How in the world can I write about this play, this incomparable giant in the world of English literature?  What can I write that others more knowledgeable and scholarly haven’t already analyzed inside and out? Googling Hamlet, I get 54 million hits.  Googling “analyzing Hamlet”, half a million hits come up. I’ll [...]

Richard Wagner’s engagement with his creative predecessor William Shakespeare began around age 13. At this time, Wagner pronounced Shakespeare’s name “Shicksper,” which triggered for him associations of fate (Shicksal = fate/destiny) and battle (Speer = spear). Wagner related this detail from the distant past to his second wife Cosima in 1874, who wrote it in [...]

While recently travelling to speak at an English teacher’s convention on the use of Shakespeare’s works in the elementary school classroom, I spent the day before my trip frantically writing plans for my substitute teacher. My fifth and sixth-grade students had recently been studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream to prepare for an upcoming production they [...]

In the Raspberry Hills Library English Book Circle the question has often been raised of how much we can accept things done to the classics. Can Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law really do that to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson?  Can Laurie R. King really have a feisty young Marry Russell marry an aging [...]

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 [...]

Dear Kenneth Branagh, Do you know how it is to see a movie that hits you like a ton of bricks and changes your life? Well, of course you do. Your Henry V did that to me. The first time I saw it I was only as vaguely aware of Shakespeare as most people are [...]