Youth theatre encourages actors to connect with characters of canonical plays, but the trajectories of young women within them can make it hard to find redemptive or empowering touch points.
Britain has lost one of its greatest actors in the Irish-born star who found fame in Dennis Potter’s groundbreaking TV drama The Singing Detective.
The Tempest’s Caliban was said to voice the fury and distress of the people forced from the Fenlands which were being drained and enclosed.
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Worrying environmental issues dominated the time of William Shakespeare as they do now, from depleted fish stocks and food shortages, to overpopulation and animal exploitation.
New prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is the latest to take on the leading role in this unravelling Shakespearean drama.
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Shakespeare often portrayed crises of legitimacy and reflected on the politics of his day but the Tories might not fare so well in a modern production.
‘King Lear’ sculpture seen in Chicago in 2008.
(tom_allan/Flickr)
Understanding consent is key to avoiding ambiguous and socially awkward encounters and reducing the potential to cause harm. There are lessons in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’.
Caliban implores his fellow island dwellers to listen to the noises in “The Tempest.”
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Scholars have scoured the works of the great playwright for clues about his faith. A scholar of theology and Shakespeare’s works says it isn’t as simple as that.
Literature from long ago speaks to the human experience of plague.
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From ‘islands of pain’ to the ‘peril of exposure,’ writers have captured the fear, emptiness and despair that characterize life during the current pandemic, writes a poet and English scholar.
Engraving from ‘The Fearefull Summer,’ a treatise published after the plague of 1625 and reprinted again in 1636, by John Taylor.
(McGill Library/Paul Yachnin)
Plague ravaged England repeatedly during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The playwright translated the experience of sickness and restoration in many ways on the stage.
Transversal Theater Company production of Titus Andronicus, 2012.
David Backovsky
Even Samuel Johnson found some of Shakespeare’s violent scenes unwatchable.
The theme at the core of Rowling’s wizarding world speaks directly to a universal human reality: The struggle to come to terms with our mortality.
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We may think of Harry Potter as escapist delight, but J.K. Rowling’s books also contain an extended theme that has more in common with King Lear than most English professors might care to admit.
Market street near the Golden Temple, Amritsar, Punjab. Ben Crowe/ERA Films
King Lear manifests the neurosis of age and abuse. While his behaviour is dramatically exaggerated, we can read universal lessons on toxic family dynamics in Shakespear’s tragedy.
Lear’s mordant images and sonorous cadences throb with dire warning and a sense of imminent catastrophe.
James Green
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?