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 [...]
It’s always said that there’s something for everyone in Shakespeare’s plays. But if you are an American teenage girl you may have to be convinced of that. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is a thirteen-year-old, almost fourteen, so she’s a character you can compare yourself with. When Romeo gatecrashes her father’s party he chats her [...]
When I was at high school half a century ago my English teacher brought out a solemn vow from me that I would never open another Shakespeare play again. He sat behind his desk while we all sat in rows in front of him with our books open. He went through Hamlet, stopping at the [...]
OK Shakespeare fans, here’s the latest Shakespeare news, hot off the press: The BBC are running a Shakespeare competition with some fantastic Shakespeare-related prizes. From the BBC: “Schools across the UK are invited to take part in Off By Heart Shakespeare, an exciting new recital contest from the BBC, for students aged 13-15. All students nominated by their school [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
There’s an exciting summer ahead for New Yorkers as Daniel Sullivan’s new production of Twelfth Night opens at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park on June 25.