The above Shakespeare timeline infographic lists the historically documented and dated facts known about Shakespeare. You might also want to check out our Shakespeare timeline page which goes into a little more detail.
I was surfing around looking for some inspiration to write a blog post on Shakespeare & New Year when I came across a wonderful piece on Peter Pappas’ tax and Shakespeare-related blog. In it he discusses a whole range of New Years’ resolutions, based on a combination of traditional resolutions a Shakespeare quotes to back [...]
As 2012 comes to an end, with the world mired in an economic morass, one thing we can reflect on with pleasure is the 2012 English summer with its highly successful Olympic Games and Paralympics (where the Olympic bell was inscribed with a quote from The Tempest). Accompanying those international sporting events in London was the World [...]
It’s almost certain that Shakespeare never left the shores of England but every year thousands of his contemporaries, wealthy young men, embarked on the ‘grand tour’ of European cities: it was an essential part of a gentleman’s education. Although Shakespeare never visited any European cities he set plays in many of them. He always had [...]
Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays in the era that the American futurologist, Alvin Toffler, dubbed ‘the first wave.’ That was the agrarian period between the hunter-gatherer era and the industrial revolution. Toffler’s most famous book, The Third Wave, published in 1980, predicted the digital world that we live in today, where tiny bits of [...]
Shakespeare enthusiasts who follow the doings of celebrities – their courtships, marriages, divorces, births and deaths – might be struck by the Justin Bieber and Selina Gomez pictures and stories that are currently filling celebrity websites and magazines. They have broken up and they’re being compared with Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, pictures of them [...]
The English kings of Shakespeare’s history plays are so convincingly portrayed that they have become historical reality for most people. For example, we follow Shakespeare’s King Henry V from his early youth, enjoying his training for kingship. We are witnesses of his great decisions, we smile at his charming approach to women and we thrill [...]
Shakespeare really was a man for all occasions, and Halloween is no exception. From witches, potions and haunted castles to severed hands, tongues cut from mouths and loved ones driven to suicidal insanity, Shakespeare’s plays have all the elements needed for the ultimate spooky Halloween event. We’ve scoured the web for the best Shakespeare Halloween [...]
The distinguished Shakespearean actor, Dame Janet Suzman has just published a book entitled Not Hamlet, about the treatment of women in theatre. One of the chapters addresses the Shakespeare conspiracy theory/authorship debate. She takes the traditional scholarly view that it was one Master William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon who wrote the plays. In her book Dame Janet [...]
The only reason we know anything at all about William Shakespeare and his ancestry is because scholars are very interested in him and have made the effort to find out. That is because his writings present a genius who not only had a great gift for story-telling and the ability to connect human emotion to [...]