Blogging Shakespeare

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 Tender Thing, directed by Helena Kaut-Howson and written by Ben Power for the RSC at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon By Pete Kirwan     Unlike the Olympics, the World Shakespeare […]

Directed by Ernesto Arias for Fundación Siglo de Oro (Spain) for Shakespeare’s Globe, London. The Globe to Globe festival made a notoriously misinformed claim in its subtitle: ‘37 plays, 37 languages.’ Three Spanish-speaking companies were invited to take part in the festival, and were duly advertised as performing in ‘Argentine’, ‘Mexican’, and ‘Castilian’ Spanish: three […]

South Florida is truly about as far from Elizabethan London as you can get, and the tropical atmosphere certainly doesn’t seem like the ideal setting for producing and experiencing the Bard’s works. I’m a 17 year-old who has lived in South Florida for my whole life and I’ve been seeking out the best local Shakespeare […]

The discovery of skeletal remains in a Leicester car park that may be those of King Richard III makes a new view of King Henry VI Part Three especially timely. For this is the play in which Richard comes on like an express train. The first words of Richard III are deservedly among the most […]

Grasping the attention of today’s children is an increasing frustration for teachers today. As more and more children are constantly exposed to a steady stream of quickly-changing images from a very early age, conditions are ripe to breed increasing problems with focus and attention. Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are becoming more prevalent […]

Heavens to betsy! No sooner do I announce that I’m going to write a series of posts on Shakespeare’s neglected plays, starting with the Henry VI trilogy, than these three plays get more attention than they have in decades. First, the Balkan productions at the World Shakespeare Festival were hits, sometimes revelatory (click for reviews […]

Can you guess who said the following about Henry VI Part One? ‘All critics, all readers, will probably agree or have agreed that it is one of the least poetical and also one of the dullest of all the plays in the Folio. It is redeemed by few passages of merit—its verse is unmusical, its […]

  All’s Well That Ends Well may seem like a simple enough play to stage. It is based upon exotic locations like The Tempest, and it does not require any elaborate representation of the outdoors like As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem to. However you still need to create distinctive […]