Blogging Shakespeare

By Andrew Brown, Yale University Blog Post 2: Coriolanus at the Royal Shakespeare Company Andrew Brown is a Ph.D. student at Yale and was one of the recipients of a Sir Stanley Wells Shakespeare Studentship, via the American Friends of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The award meant he could work in the archives and libraries in […]

How should actors speak the verse in Shakespeare’s plays? Are there any reliable rules for doing so? Do the forms in which the plays were first printed offer guidelines in their use of punctuation, capital letters, line division, and layout on the page?  Should actors stress the ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum rhythm of the […]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   Much Ado About Nothing, dir. Iqbal Khan, Royal Shakespeare Company, 8 August 2012 at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon By Kate Rumbold, University of Birmingham Bicycles dangled from the ceiling, engines revved, and […]

Our revered guardian of theatrical values, Michael Billington, has recently joined Twitter. The news provoked a flurry of excitement among regular tweeters. His first message to what is already becoming a large band of devoted followers both posed a question and offered a recommendation. ‘Saw the Shrew in Stratford last night. I once called for […]

  I’m just back from the very enjoyable conference I wrote about in my last blog, ‘Where has all the Verse Gone? Shakespeare’s Poetry on the Page and on the Stage’, hosted by U.C.L.A. (13-14 May). There can be few events which are more deeply satisfying to an enquiring mind than a really good gathering […]

The editors of The Stage newspaper have asked me to write a piece commemorating fifty years of the RSC. This has made me delve into memories of more than half a century’s Stratford theatre-going. I came here first for a short holiday in 1954, when I saw four plays. My main memories are of Barbara […]

This is a big season for Mariah Gale. She adds Juliet to her illustrious list of Shakespearian heroines she has played at Stratford. I had the pleasure of chairing a question and answer session with her the other day for a group of undergraduates from the University of Tennessee and Georgetown University. It is good […]