Blogging Shakespeare

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a day’s symposium at the University of Roehampton on Shakespeare and the Contemporary Sonnet. There I met poet Philip Terry who has published his own adaptations and creative responses to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He’s Director of Creative Writing for the University of Essex. Here he is reading three [...]

The first tweet I saw when I logged on this morning was that Dame Judi Dench, C.H. had just read a Shakespeare sonnet on the B.B.C. Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme. I’d missed it but wanted immediately to know which one she’d read. Her voice is exactly well suited to these poems: intimate, multi-textured, lyrical. Dame [...]

To go into the Barbican concert hall and see the full forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra ranged in tiers before you is to see a splendid sight. The auditorium, shaped like a great oyster shell, resembles that of The Olivier Theatre at The National. In both, visibility is excellent from any part of the [...]

The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because [...]

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the new Guy Richie film released in the UK this month, will inevitably raise the question foregrounded by his first Sherlock Holmes film: are Holmes and Watson supposed to be gay? The films unashamedly toy with the idea. Discussing Sherlock Holmes on The Late Show with David Letterman, Robert [...]

Today I want to explore further that strange speech of Helena’s from All’s Well That Ends Well that I shared with you in my last post. You’ll recall that Paroles says of virginity,‘’tis a withered pear. Will you anything with it?’, to which Helena answers: Not my virginity yet— There shall your master have a [...]

This week I had a visit from Rakshpal Singh Sangha, who had made the long journey from India to deliver a number of translations of Shakespeare’s works for his friend Professor Jagdish Chander Joshi.  On behalf of Professor Joshi, Rakshpal presented our library with Hindi translations of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, ‘Julius Caesar’, and ‘As [...]

I wrote last week in anticipation of our annual ‘Winter School’, which this year took the form of a round up of the Shakespearian year. One of those sessions took its inspiration from Puck’s line: ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2. 1.) Actually, it took [...]

My daughter has been invited to read at a friend’s wedding, so she asked me if I could suggest an appropriate passage from Shakespeare. This set me thinking about the use of Shakespeare for public occasions. The most surprising choice I remember for a wedding was when the best man chose to read Hamlet’s verses [...]