In spite of experiencing the worst summer weather since records began London is more crowded this summer than it has ever been. There was the Wimbledon tennis tournament earlier this month and the 2012 Olympic Games begin later this week. There is also, of course, an international Shakespeare Festival: the Proms, the world’s biggest classical [...]
Who knew that Shakespeare’s sonnets and mathematics were so linked? In the super-interesting video below, Professor Roger Bowley talks about the tight constraints – and shape – that numbers gave to Shakespeare’s sonnets.
When the young William Shakespeare went to London, almost a hundred miles away from his hometown of Stratford Upon Avon, to look for work, he was doing something unusual. Most young men stayed at home and usually went into the same area of work as their fathers. One might have expected young William to become [...]
There’s nothing wrong with starting on Shakespeare young… but reciting a Shakespeare sonnet word-for-word at the age of two? Check out this little guy reciting Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet – number 18, “Shall I Compare Thee To Summer’s Day?”. Pretty incredible stuff! What’s the best thing you could recite when you were two years [...]
A quick pop quiz for you, do you think the quotes below words are from a hip hop track or Shakespeare play? “To destroy the beauty from which one came” “Maybe it’s hatred I spew, maybe it’s food for the spirit” “Men would rather use their broken records than their bear hands” “I was not [...]
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 [...]
Emotions around the current, revived debate about the Shakespeare authorship are raging. Shakespeare scholars are ‘infuriated,’ ‘outraged,’ ‘angry’ about the implications of the film Anonymous, that de Vere wrote the plays and that Shakespeare was just a country bumpkin, turned actor, used as a cover by de Vere. If I were capable of any emotions [...]
William Shakespeare was nine years old when the first theatre in England was opened. The idea of a dedicated building for the performance of plays was conceived as late as 1576, when James Burbage, the father of Shakespeare’s future acting colleague, Richard Burbage, built a theatre in Shoreditch, London, which he called ‘The Theatre.’ These [...]
All over the news the last week is Jesse Anderson, a software developer in Reno, Nevada, who’s created a computer program that will type letters at a very fast rate. He claims that, in time, those random letters will type the complete works of Shakespeare accurately, word for word, and that, in fact, his program [...]
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 [...]