An historian, working with a team of digital artists, has spent three months updating a series of classic portraits to reflect how historical figures might look today. A fourteen part television series is underway on the UK television channel, Yesterday. Shakespeare is one of the subjects. They’ve used the Cobbe portrait of 1610, in which [...]
William Shakespeare turns 449 on 23rd of April 2013. His birthday is celebrated in thousands of places around the world every year. Next year will be the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, along with the other major English Shakespeare institutions like the Globe Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare [...]
I’m grateful to Ed Kliman, one of our readers, for drawing my attention to the composer, Robert Johnson, the son of John Johnson, lutenist to Elizabeth I , who had a long working relationship with Shakespeare. The two men worked together on several of the plays, like a Renaissance Rogers and Hammerstein. We tend to [...]
Guest blog post from English teacher Robert Dale,. “It’s Spring!” My English teacher used to yell, usually at the boys. “The sap is rising!” She would look at us meaningfully, then repeat, “RISING” in a tone of great meaning and portent. Not that we got what she was saying, the boys far too distracted with [...]
Stabbings, beheadings, poisonings, drownings, snakebites, hanging, cannabalism and more – what a collection of gruesome deaths Shakespeare wrote into his tragedy plays! This cool infographic from progressivegeographies.com shows how each of Shakespeare’s characters that dies in the tragedy plays meets their (often grisly) end: Like the above? Check out more fun Shakespeare infographics in Pintrest
England is one of the world’s top tourist destinations, where visits to the homes of English poets, dramatists, novelists, artists, composers and scientists are firmly on the itinerary. To name just a few, around London one can see the homes of Milton, Darwin, Keats, Coleridge, Dickens, Dr Johnson and many others. A few day trips [...]
We are in the middle of a harsh winter, one that has gripped the northern hemisphere more firmly than usual, and in spite of our modern life with heating wherever we go, it can be quite unpleasant and inconvenient at times. Some people like the winter weather but Shakespeare wasn’t one of them. Shakespeare grew [...]
February 14th is a very special day for us in Western culture: St Valentine’s Day - a day when we pull out all the stops to express our love for the one with whom we’re romantically involved, with flowers, chocolates, special treats and words of love. We often think about Shakespeare at this time, because [...]
We are all familiar with a range of Medieval English kings. We know about the fiery, charismatic Bolingbroke who deposed his weak cousin, Richard II, who was indecisive and cowardly. It’s an historical fact that Bolingbroke became Henry IV and we also know that he was an unsuccessful, unfulfilled monarch who spent the last part [...]
There was an interesting article in the UK Newspaper, The Mail, last week, about a research project centered on the reading of literature. The researchers at the University of Liverpool found that the reading of challenging literature, particularly Shakespeare and Wordsworth, has a beneficial effect on the mind, providing a ‘rocket-boost to morale by catching the reader’s [...]