Blogging Shakespeare

Of the three “problem plays,” Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, with their dark cynicism about sex and politics, seem finally to be coming into their own in our darkly cynical time. Not so All’s Well That Ends Well. All’s Well has been called the comic version of Coriolanus; if nothing else, these are [...]

  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. [...]

A special dispatch from Perry Mills, of King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s School), one of the most inspiring school teachers I know… ‘In recent years Edward’s Boys – an all-boy theatre company from King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon (“Shakespeare’s School”) – have been performing rarely-seen plays originally written for the Early Modern boys’ [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   Pericles, Directed by James Farrell and Jamie Rocha-Allan for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 October 2012. By José A. Pérez Díez Arguably, the main difference between [...]

In 2011/12 the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was the Arts Council’s fifth highest regularly funded organisation (RFO) with a grant of £16,413,895 (down from £17,639,392 the previous year) behind The Royal Opera House, Southbank Centre, National Theatre and English National Opera. These top five organisations account for a third of the Arts Council’s total RFO [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   Much Ado About Nothing, dir. Iqbal Khan, Royal Shakespeare Company, 8 August 2012 at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon By Kate Rumbold, University of Birmingham Bicycles dangled from the ceiling, engines revved, and [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   A Soldier in Every Son – ‘Chaos Comes to Establish a New Order’ By Leticia Garcia, University of California at Irvine The cross-cultural collaborations forming part of the Globe to [...]

There have been murmurs of disquiet for a while about all-male Shakespeare. Jenni Tomlin said on the Social Justice First website that it, ‘serves to highlight our deep history of sexism and inequality‘ while Jo Caird at Whatsonstage.com worries about how it denies work to women, ‘given the chronic underrepresentation of women on the British [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   West Side Story, choreographed and directed by Will Tuckett, 4 July 2012 at the Sage, Gateshead By Monika Smialkowska, University of Northumbria Like most of us, I first encountered [...]