Blogging Shakespeare

Solving Mysteries in the SBT Archives: Ethel Webling and Herbert Beerbohm Tree By Ella Hawkins   Tucked away in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Rare Books strongroom is an item that has until recently been shrouded in mystery: a unique edition of Julius Caesar with an undocumented origin, purpose, and past. The item features printed pages […]

Shakespeare performed live by actors 1,600 miles apart in world first through university’s ‘Stargate’-style cyber stage By Hannah Smith, press officer. An act of Shakespeare has been performed live by drama students in Finland and the West Midlands thanks to a life-sized digital portal. Coventry University’s performing arts school teamed up with students in the University of […]

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 […]

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 […]

How good is your own theatrical imagination as you read a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries? Have you ever wondered how to communicate the possibilities of live theatre to other people, perhaps a group of students? Have you ever wondered where to look for guidance before directing or acting in a play? […]

I wanted so badly for it to be PERFECT – expected it would be after the BBC’s Richard II! – but oh dear, a miss is as good as a mile. Henry IV? YES. Hotspur & Kate? YES. Supporting cast? YES. Falstaff? Um… Hal? Er… Hal was great for the serious stuff (his showdown with […]

Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Mark Antony   I recently had the pleasure of seeing Greg Doran’s Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and the striking set made me think about the grand visual feast of Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1898. Like Doran’s production, Tree’s was mounted in the wake […]

As Elizabeth Schafer reminds us in the Shakespeare in Production edition of the play, ‘The Taming of the Shrew has been phenomenally popular outside English-speaking countries’. Sweden is no exception in this respect; The Taming of the Shrew has been one of the five most popular Shakespeare plays in this country for well over a […]

In the third and final part of this current series, I speak to Liu Tong/Archer Liu, from Shanghai International Studies University. Here is a bright, young man who is passionate about Shakespeare in performance and about the English language. It was truly inspiring to meet Archer whose commitment to Shakespeare is palpable. Do you know […]