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 [...]
We recently stumbled across the rather amusing “Epic Rap Battles of History”. In at number 12 was the Shakespeare vs Dr Seuss battle. For those who aren’t acquanted with battle rapping, it’s a freestyle rapping competition between two or more rappers in front of an audience, with the aim of insulting the other rappers in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Just came across this fantastic YouTube snippet of Patrick Stewart on Sesame Street, performing the famous “to be or not to be” Hamlet soliloquy with a twist: It seems to me that this guy could read anything and give it depth (just look at his performances in the X Men). And unlike many a Shakespearean [...]