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 [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
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 [...]
As the summer-spanning Shakespeare extravaganza that is the World Shakespeare Festival comes to an end in the UK we’ve flicked through the NoSweatShakespeare facebook page to pull together a selection of our favourite moments from the festival. With over 70 productions and exhibitions, 50 theatre companies and thousands of international artists there was certainly plenty of choice, but the [...]
We’ve been trawling the internet of late for some comedy takes on Shakespeare to share on the NoSweatShakespeare facebook page, and slowly but surely have stumbled across the internet sub-culture of “memes”. Warning: 30 second internet culture/patronizing lesson coming up! Historically, a meme has meant a discrete “package of culture” that travels via word of mouth – as a [...]
The Hatwalk event – commissioned by the Mayor of London as part of the London 2012 festival - started before dawn on July 30th when 21 of London’s best known statues were given bespoke head-wear…one of London’s more wacky arts events to take place this summer. The Shakespeare bust in Leicester Square was given a bunny baseball hat, [...]