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 [...]
We are all familiar with a range of Medieval English kings. We know about the fiery, charismatic Bolingbroke who deposed his weak cousin, Richard II, who was indecisive and cowardly. It’s an historical fact that Bolingbroke became Henry IV and we also know that he was an unsuccessful, unfulfilled monarch who spent the last part [...]
There was an interesting article in the UK Newspaper, The Mail, last week, about a research project centered on the reading of literature. The researchers at the University of Liverpool found that the reading of challenging literature, particularly Shakespeare and Wordsworth, has a beneficial effect on the mind, providing a ‘rocket-boost to morale by catching the reader’s [...]
I was surfing around looking for some inspiration to write a blog post on Shakespeare & New Year when I came across a wonderful piece on Peter Pappas’ tax and Shakespeare-related blog. In it he discusses a whole range of New Years’ resolutions, based on a combination of traditional resolutions a Shakespeare quotes to back [...]
As 2012 comes to an end, with the world mired in an economic morass, one thing we can reflect on with pleasure is the 2012 English summer with its highly successful Olympic Games and Paralympics (where the Olympic bell was inscribed with a quote from The Tempest). Accompanying those international sporting events in London was the World [...]
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 [...]
The distinguished Shakespearean actor, Dame Janet Suzman has just published a book entitled Not Hamlet, about the treatment of women in theatre. One of the chapters addresses the Shakespeare conspiracy theory/authorship debate. She takes the traditional scholarly view that it was one Master William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon who wrote the plays. In her book Dame Janet [...]
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, [...]