Blogging Shakespeare

Romeo played by Johnny Depp. Now that I would have liked to see. He has, to be sure, scrupulously avoided playing the gorgeous romantic leads that his looks would have made possible, but in his lost vulnerable Gilbert Grape and Sam (of Benny and Joon) days he would have put more depth, or at least […]

                  While attending the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elementary Educators Conference this summer, I had the supreme pleasure of meeting two fantastic authors,  who have supplied those of us who dare to teach Shakespeare with two inspiring, new resources for the classroom.  Acclaimed playwright Ken Ludwig recently published […]

When I started blogging on Shakespeare Calling a couple of years ago I had some kind of vague ambition – alongside of reading the plays and writing short responses to them – of seeing all the movies based on the plays, going to the theater to see the productions, reading the books about the plays… […]

Bitola, Macedonia, 19-25 July 2013   The Bitola Shakespeare Festival is extending the bold intercultural experiment of last year’s Globe-to-Globe Festival in London. As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Globe-to-Globe launched a planetary Shakespeare project by inviting 37 companies from around the world to perform the playwright’s works in their home languages. The Bitola […]

While the works of William Shakespeare have shaped nearly all facets of modern culture today, his influence is keenly felt in the popular music scene.  Marjorie Garber, an English professor at Harvard University, writes in her book Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon Books, 2008), “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare”. In 1949, the first VW Beetle arrived in […]

Two years ago I was approached by our colleagues and friends at The Shakespeare Institute: would The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust be interested in collaborating on a new MA Programme on Shakespeare and Creativity? I was more than interested. The idea resonated through years of my seeing and knowing that Shakespeare is a tremendous source of […]

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 […]