Happy New Year to all our readers. This is a big year for Shakespeare. It’s not a very well known fact, but Shakespeare played a role in winning the Olympic Games for London. Not only is he the most famous London resident of turn of sixteenth/seventeenth century London but also, according to the results of [...]
That’s right folks, along with our Facebook page and twitter presence, No Sweat Shakespeare has now launched a Google+ page! It’s early days – and we’re really only just figuring out how it all works – but we’ve kicked things off with a few postings, including a rather nice collection of original drawings and etching [...]
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 [...]
Emotions around the current, revived debate about the Shakespeare authorship are raging. Shakespeare scholars are ‘infuriated,’ ‘outraged,’ ‘angry’ about the implications of the film Anonymous, that de Vere wrote the plays and that Shakespeare was just a country bumpkin, turned actor, used as a cover by de Vere. If I were capable of any emotions [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Has Shakespeare’s inspiration for Ophelia – one of literature’s most tragic heroines – finally come to light? A 1569 coroners report published in The Guardian tantalizing suggests maybe so. In 1569 – when Shakespeare was five years old – a small girl named Jane Shaxspere was reported as slipping and drowning whilst collecting flowers [...]
An article on the NoSweatShakespeare site outlines the various claims of the portraits that vie for the distinction of being representations of Shakespeare. Just as with Jesus, we all have a mental image of Shakespeare. Although we know that Jesus didn’t look like the conventional pictures of him, with blue eyes, very light skin and [...]
It seems to be catching. But after all, this is the second Elizabethan age so harking back to the golden age of English theatre shouldn’t be surprising. Sam Wannermaker’s Globe Theatre in London has proved a great success and now it’s the turn of the North of England. Dame Judi Dench, Shakespearean actor and movie [...]
Shakespeare has been quoted in many places for many reasons before now, but plans by London Underground to use Shakespeare quotes on tube trains may yet be the most outlandish! Bosses at London Underground have asked tube drivers to mix quotes from various authors, philosophers and great thinkers with their usual announcements. The initiative is [...]
The debate about what Shakespeare looked like has taken a new turn with the discovery of a new portrait by Cobbe.