Blogging Shakespeare

We’re getting ready to celebrate Shakespeare’s Birthday. Last year 99 bloggers were involved in this project by writing posts or recording videos on how Shakespeare has impacted their life or by recalling a special Shakespeare memory. How has Shakespeare made a difference to your life? What memories do your earliest encounters with Shakespeare evoke? We […]

Shakespeare loves being talked about. I’m sure he was delighted when audience members (crammed into The Globe or the Blackfriars theatre) nudged one another and exchanged thoughts about the plays. One of the earliest references to him as a writer relates to his ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends.’ It’s good to imagine poems in […]

Our Chairman, and world’s leading Shakespeare expert, Professor Stanley Wells C.B.E., was invited to toast the Worldwide Appreciation of Shakespeare at the Birthday lunch. We thought you’d like to see what he said…. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this ceremony today, and the traditions that belong to it, provide ample testimony to the fact that Shakespeare is […]

I read theatre reviews for all sorts of reasons. Often I want to know what a show is like which I know I won’t be able to see. Sometimes I like to know whether my own thoughts about a particular production are shared more widely. There is a certain feeling of justice being done (isn’t […]

Janet Suzman’s production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse was a great success, acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. Paul Edmondson wrote perceptively about it in his blog last week. It was, necessarily at that address, unfashionable in being played on a proscenium arch stage. Reactions against such staging began as long ago […]

Janet Suzman’s production at the Liverpool Playhouse has restored Antony and Cleopatra for me after its recently lost fortunes. Every so often a production comes round that while you are watching it you know is going to burn bright in the mind’s eye for years to come. The story-telling and political stakes (never easy with […]

This post is part of our Shakespeare’s Women series in parternship with the collections team over at Finding Shakespeare. On flickr we have created a collection portraying these wonderful ladies. In my mind’s eye, Ophelia is always drowning. She is garlanded with flowers, she is singing, and she is drowning.  ‘Long it could not be’, […]

Our readers, Anton Lesser and Janet Suzman, had been rehearsing all afternoon with the programme devisor, Ronnie Mulryne for ‘Soul of the Age’: A Celebration of 800 Years of Holy Trinity Church. The programme took us through eight centuries of faith and doubt from the early Medieval period (Noah’s fractious wife from the Wakefield Mystery […]

It’s not every actor who can speak poetry well. Daring to elevate heightened language so that it rises from the page somewhere between song and naturally spoken word is a risk that many actors choose to avoid. It is not part of drama school training and tends to be skill which is acquired gradually over […]