Blogging Shakespeare

As we leave the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival I look across Kansas City to the trees lying beyond the skyscrapers. The Winter’s Tale which we saw in Southmoreland Park feels like it is sending its city beat onto the road in front of us. We are at once driving away from and heading towards […]

We’ve had a terrific and enjoyably intense first full day, thanks in no small part to the orchestrative efforts of Artistic Director Sidonie Garrett, a force of nature and of culture, and someone who is bound to feature again on this site. We conducted fourteen interviews with people associated with the Heart of America Shakespeare […]

                  While attending the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Elementary Educators Conference this summer, I had the supreme pleasure of meeting two fantastic authors,  who have supplied those of us who dare to teach Shakespeare with two inspiring, new resources for the classroom.  Acclaimed playwright Ken Ludwig recently published […]

In January of 2014, Shakespeare’s Globe will be moving indoors. The much anticipated Sam Wanamaker Playhouse will open with a season of early modern plays. But why should anyone be interested in this new theatre when the great Globe itself has been the main attraction of the Bankside complex for the last 15 years? 1. […]

Pericles has a claim to be Shakespeare’s most overlooked play. Nonprofessional Shakespeareans are likely never to have seen, read, or even heard of it. It is among the last plays to have entered the canon. The text is notoriously corrupt. And the consensus that it is a collaboration is among the firmest for any of […]

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. The exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World focuses on Shakespeare’s ‘world rather than his life’. Droeshout’s image of Shakespeare looms over the ticket booking process, the programme, and the entrance to 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.   In a Pickle, Oily Cart/Royal Shakespeare Company, dir. Tim Webb, 28 June 2012, at the Northern Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne By Adam Hansen, University of Northumbria This production did […]

The Winter’s tale is one of the few plays most remembered for a stage direction.  The direction in question is one in which Antigonus  must ‘Exit pursued by a bear’. Despite the apparent comedy of the line things don’t go well for Antigonus as the next we hear of him he has been eaten (apparently […]

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.   AROUND THE GLOBE AND BACK AGAIN: A MOMENT TO REFLECT By Colette Gordon, University of Cape Town Now that the Globe to Globe World Shakespeare festival has completed its Olympian […]