What have Hamlet, Tony Blair, H.G. Wells, David Frost, the Emperor Nero, Brian Clough, the White Rabbit and Kenneth Williams got in common? This is an easy one: they’ve all been played by the flavour of the month actor, Michael Sheen. The Welsh actor has played Tony Blair in three films – The Deal, The [...]
William Shakespeare was nine years old when the first theatre in England was opened. The idea of a dedicated building for the performance of plays was conceived as late as 1576, when James Burbage, the father of Shakespeare’s future acting colleague, Richard Burbage, built a theatre in Shoreditch, London, which he called ‘The Theatre.’ These [...]
All over the news the last week is Jesse Anderson, a software developer in Reno, Nevada, who’s created a computer program that will type letters at a very fast rate. He claims that, in time, those random letters will type the complete works of Shakespeare accurately, word for word, and that, in fact, his program [...]
I wouldn’t go as far as to equate those who deny Shakespeare as the author of the Shakespeare plays with holocaust deniers, but both categories beggar belief. There is no doubt about either –the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the fact that William Shakespeare wrote the plays. The film Anonymous, which has just been [...]
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines. It refers to the political and sexual corruption that surrounds Hamlet at the court of Elsinore. Humourist blogger Marc C Miller tells us that he’s found Shakespeare’s source for that – an old sardine dumping ground near the castle. He [...]
London 2012 is going to be big. As part of the celebrations there is to be Cultural Olympiad’s London 2012 festival and a major component of that will be a huge, international Shakespeare festival. We always talk about Shakespeare’s relevance in the modern world – Shakespeare for every generation, usually referring to the English speaking [...]
When I was at school, a long long time ago, an all boys’ school, we had a lot of fun in English by nudging each other and giggling behind our books whenever a word or phrase appeared that suggested anything sexual at all. Things like ‘He tossed and turned all night’ and ‘the soldiers [...]
Helen Mirren plays the role of Prospero in a new film of The Tempest. In a recent interview with the Huffington Post she said: ‘I played the man role. Shakespeare very often had boys dressed as girls but not so often women dressed as men, but I play it as a woman. I don’t play [...]
Looking something like a serial killers’ notebook, a 20-year-old London girl’s Shakespeare-related scribbles have gone viral this week. Simply writing a bunch of words and phrases Shakespeare invented (admittedly in a somewhat unique font!) in her Moleskine notebook at 3am, taking a photo of it and posting it on Tumblr has got tongues wagging all over the world. We [...]
One question that will never be on any quizmaster’s list is ‘Who was Shakespeare?’ The reason is that it’s too easy. It’s like the question ‘What is the usual accompaniment in England to deep fried, battered fish?’ If you don’t know the answer then you’ve never been in England. And yet the 2007 winner of [...]
As we are products of our time and our culture, when we think about furnishing our house or our apartment we’re often thinking as much about the furniture’s design as its function. Furniture is considered a form of decorative art these days: it may even serve a symbolic or religious purpose, so when we go [...]
I read an article recently about a literature reading in Greenwich, New York, by a group going by the name of ‘Naked Girls Reading.’ The women come onstage in kimonos, led by the delightfully named Nasty Canasta and Gal Friday. They then drop their kimonos and begin their reading, which includes passages from Shakespeare. It’s [...]
The official Star Trek Convention will take place this month in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s a special event in that it’s the forty-fifth anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek. The guest appearances make up a pretty formidable list of stars, far too long to honour all the celebrities who will participate, but some [...]
It’s always said that there’s something for everyone in Shakespeare’s plays. But if you are an American teenage girl you may have to be convinced of that. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is a thirteen-year-old, almost fourteen, so she’s a character you can compare yourself with. When Romeo gatecrashes her father’s party he chats her [...]
When I was at high school half a century ago my English teacher brought out a solemn vow from me that I would never open another Shakespeare play again. He sat behind his desk while we all sat in rows in front of him with our books open. He went through Hamlet, stopping at the [...]