Bruce Smith, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
For over four centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have been picked apart and reimagined.
People hold up face masks with Shakespeare’s portrait during celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of his death this year. It was a completely different story when he died.
Dylan Martinez/Reuters
This year, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death has been marked by a flood of events around the world. But why did his exit cause so little public grief at the time, in and beyond the country of his birth?
An artwork by James C. Christensen, which represents Shakespeare with characters from all of his plays.
Tracy Lee/Flickr
Attributing a Shakespeare work to another writer attracts plenty of critics. But an attribution specialist says his team’s decision to name Christopher Marlowe as a co-author is based on state of the art research.
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies. But in the light of 21st-century understandings of abuse, the play is recast as a textbook case of domestic terrorism.
A new production of Edward II by the ‘bad boy of Elizabethan drama’ breathes fresh life into the play, accentuating the story’s political and psychological dimensions.
The cast of Twelfth Night rehearse at the Belvoir St Theatre.
Brett Boardman
Belvoir St Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night features veteran actor Keith Robinson, who returns to the stage after recovering from Guillain-Barre Syndrome. There’s radical potential in cross-mobility casting – but Belvoir doesn’t quite get there.
Tang and Shakespeare’s dramas are being blended together in a series of adaptions.
Performance Infinity
Shakespeare was not the only famous dramatist to die in 1616. On the other side of the world, in China, another theatrical legend was laid to rest.
A typescript for the Female Eunuch with photo of a young Greer on a book.
Germaine Greer archive: 2014.0038.0001. Picture Nathan Gallagher, copyright University of Melbourne
The Greer archives brim with notebooks and papers from her time as a student of the traditional humanities. And reading The Female Eunuch for evidence of the Bard reveals a new kind of book, one that is deeply informed by this scholarship.
The psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s characters has rendered them timeless. Today, we see The Bard’s influence in shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘True Detective.’
Many must wish that Shakespeare’s final words to posterity consisted of something more than a curt demand to be left alone.
From Horace Walpole to Steven King, Shakespeare has inspired centuries of supernatural Gothic terror.
Macbeth And Banquo, Théodore Chassériau, 1855. Via Wikimedia Commons
Hamlet begins with a ‘night of the living dead’; Banquo turns into a ghost . The Bard had a supernatural streak and it was crucial to the genesis of Gothic literature.