A copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio of plays has been found in Scotland. While this is good news, a staggering 744 plays from Shakespearian London - at least two of them written by the Bard - remain lost.
Shakespeare’s use of dialect is a key argument used by those who stand by the traditional author. But these so-called “Warwickshire dialect” words are nothing of the sort.
Stratford-upon-Avon is beginning to resemble Disneyland.
The wives win hands-down in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
REUTERS/Toby Melville. An image of playwright William Shakespeare from The Herball, a 16th-century book on plants.
While London and Stratford-upon-Avon go into meltdown over the upcoming anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, a new production – shown recently in Western Australia – is worth looking at closely.
Evidence is mounting to suggest that William Shakespeare drew at least some of his inspiration from cannabis.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Lear’s mordant images and sonorous cadences throb with dire warning and a sense of imminent catastrophe. So what’s the play’s key message, for current times, with Geoffrey Rush in the title role?
We cannot help but remember Hamlet: it is iconic.
Robin Goldsworthy, Ivan Donato, Philip Dodd, Josh McConville. Photo: Daniel Boud
Hamlet is a play that haunts itself. Its saturation into cultural consciousness means that watching a performance is inevitably a process of past ghosts and past echoes framing the current performance.
In a 2005 production of Hamlet, director Haris Pasovic portrayed Hamlet as a Muslim prince at the Ottoman court.
Reuters
The Melbourne Festival production of Desdemona, written by Toni Morrison and with music by Malian songstress Rokia Traore, puts the women of Shakespeare’s Othello centre stage.
Macbeth: I’m not all bad. Honest.
Studio Canal publicity
The latest filmmaker to try his hand at Macbeth, Justin Kurzel has delivered a cinematic masterpiece, but shies away from the wicked depths of his villains.
What does telling the story of the long-running conflict in the Congo through the lens of Verdi’s Macbeth teach us? Owen Metsileng and Nobulumko Mngxek in Macbeth.
by Nicky Newman
Brett Bailey’s Macbeth at Brisbane Festival is a powerful production that relocates Verdi’s opera (based on Shakespeare’s play) to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
English caricaturist Richard Newton’s 1798 cartoon depicts John Bull farting on the face of King George III.
Library of Congress