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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
It’s interesting to reflect on how deeply and broadly Shakespeare infiltrates our culture. He is everywhere in history in some context or other (something we discussed in our Shakespeare in America article). On Wednesday, 9th April, 1865, five days before he was murdered, Abraham Lincoln was still celebrating the end of the Civil War with [...]
Who was the most influential literary writer in our Western Culture? The mind springs immediately to Shakespeare. But there was a far more influential writer, who produced only one surviving book. He’s an anonymous writer but he wrote the Gospel of St Mark some fifteen hundred years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. We don’t know who [...]
There was a BBC series recently in which writers talked about their writing habits, which got me thinking about Shakespeare’s writing habits. The conversations the writers in this series had with the show’s presenter took place in the rooms where they wrote, and the show was mainly about where writers write. It’s interesting how so [...]
There was a BBC series recently in which writers talked about their writing habits, which got me thinking about Shakespeare’s writing habits. The conversations the writers in this series had with the show’s presenter took place in the rooms where they wrote, and the show was mainly about where writers write. It’s interesting how so [...]
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 [...]
When we go to the theatre we expect the costumes to be appropriate to the period in which the play is set, and the different characters will wear costumes that express their individual status of class, nationality and so on. But in Shakespeare’s time there were certain difficulties regarding theatrical costumes that we don’t encounter [...]