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• Tom Holland on “The Scottish Play” (more Hot Ones + Shakespeare)

  I try not to let myself get hung up on superstition because I’m the type of person that can really really get sucked into it…Without trying to sound too much like a douchebag and too grandiose, I I love the feeling that you could die out there. I love the feeling that it could all fall apart. So, for me, I don’t like to tempt anything.

• Andrew Garfield is playing Wat Tyler in a new film about the Peasants’ Revolt, featuring an exceptionally petulant 14 year-old Richard II.

• 30 years of Shakespeare on the Common + a Skivvie Puck2 + themed ice cream.

  Of course, the reality of an outdoor stage in an urban park invites unscripted drama, like the time a fire started on stage during “Julius Caesar,” prompting another actor to grab a fire extinguisher and promptly put it out…

• “Oskar Eustis, Theater Giant, Is Stepping Down. First, He Has Thoughts.”3

  But there we go — we make history, but we do not make it in conditions of our own choosing, as Karl Marx once said.

• The shows we never want to see again via . Natasha Tripney is excellent on what I will now call, “Hat Shakespeare” (“There were so many excellent hats!”) +

  I saw a company called something like Bouncy Castle Shakespeare do truncated productions of Hamlet and Macbeth on a bouncy castle and it was very rough in a lot of ways but I kind of thought there was something to it. I liked the use of a bouncy castle on top of the bouncy castle during the play within the play, and I sort of thought ‘they kind of have something?’ Then they did “Bouncy Castle Dracula” off their own script and it immediately became apparent that they were in fact terrible.

• “I was really interested in doing an all-female Timon of Athens...”

• No, there aren’t a bunch of newly minted Lancastrians running around Tanglewood.

• The new PM “claims to have read all of William Shakespeare’s plays.”

• Daniel Evans and Jonathan Groff on As You Like It.4

  …we've given you a hint of what your costume [in Arden] is, which has some sheepskin trim and a school tie around your thigh.

• If you’ll be in London August 29–31, go visit the first Twelfth Night venue.

• "Get, Set, Romeo and Juliet!"5

  Throughout the show, actors encourage the kids to root for their "team," by chanting, "Give 'em a 'woo' for Montague," and "Ready, set, Capulet."

• 50 Plays by Women+ Over 50 includes Professor Sycorax.

• William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs in Melbourne, The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove6 in SoCal, and The Tempest at a blast furnace in Pittsburgh.

• The Druid McB comes to NYC.

• “A better gimmick is to have all the company learn the play really, really well and perform it clearly, creatively and with intelligence.”

• “Becoming Hamlet is a participatory theater experience where you step into the role of Hamlet.”

• Bill Nighy on Jane Austen and Shakespeare:

  …it’s like Shakespeare, I don’t do Shakespeare. I mean, I know he’s the greatest poet that ever walked the Earth, but the performing of it, I’ll leave to other people, because I can’t – I have no real enthusiasm for the challenges of the iambic pentameter.

• on Simon Forman on Autolycus as a “colt pixie” and Julie Taymor’s Titus:

  Anthony Hopkins, who plays the part, describes it as “King Lear meets Hannibal Lecter”.

• How to make the headline, “We Found a Tree” mildly more interesting.

• Nepo baby cast in an “iconic” role, unclear what, maybe Midsummer-ish, maybe in Edinburgh?7 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Adding a Queen to Lear:

  …McCallum’s “King Lear” provides one of those perspective shifts in a wordless opening sequence, during which the widower king loses his queen, a woman that Shakespeare’s text never mentions. As Rhoads first strides into the stage space from outside, a robed female figure stays behind at the edge of the greensward, gazing at the dreaming river.

• Father Lear: the musical

  Charismatic leader Father Lear has grown his church from a traveling music show into a major broadcast and cable network, thanks to the effort and charms of his daughters, the Lear Sisters.

• “What shifts when one of theatre’s best-known tragic heroes becomes a heroine? …not much.”

• “Ophelia: The Cultural Afterlife” via .

• “[Christopher Nolan] recommended a film by Kurasawa called Ran, that inspired him and I watched it and I could see exactly what he was saying.”

• Historian Helen Castor:

  Q: Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?

  A: I love the sentence as a form, and try to hold on to as many as I can, despite an increasingly porous memory. But if I’m allowed to choose two? They’re from Glendower’s conversation with Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1, and contain so much of what I write about: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” “Why, so can I, or so can any man, / But will they come when you do call for them?”

• “A new drama centered on Chicago’s first Black mayor is coming to the Lookingglass Theatre. Titled “Prince Hal,” a riff on a famous character in William Shakespeare’s “Henry IV…”

• So much Shakespeare in CT.

• Shakespeare in Pope’s Iliad in Homer Haunted via .

  ...the arms of the Trojan warriors, umbered by the fire, recall the scene around the campfires on the night before Agincourt, as described in Henry V: ‘Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames/Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.’

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Recommendations

• Twain town.

• Eel smuggling.

  “…their rarity combined with a rising demand for their meat has pushed prices to a level approaching those of cocaine.”

• A short story by Alan Turing.

• Get in kids, we’re going to the workhouse!

• The Fish Pirate’s Daughter, Ketchikan’s annual musical melodrama.

• Atherstone Ball Game rules: “Stay on Long Street” + “Don’t kill anyone”

• “When the director of a passion play offered to nail Bautista to a cross in the name of empirical authenticity, the anthropologist declined.”

• “The only excuse an actor has – and it's a legitimate excuse – if you suck in a movie is, ‘I didn't know what movie I was in.’”

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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• It is bad enough that renowned 19th c. Shakespearean actor2 George Frederick Cooke was buried far from his UK home in a Manhattan graveyard. But then Edmund Kean stole his toe, Edwin Booth kept a tooth, and his skull ended up in a community theater production of Hamlet in New Jersey 150 years after his death.3

  Kean kept one of Cooke’s toes as a relic on the “altar” of his mantelpiece, until his wife threw the treasure out a window in disgust4…The skull was offered on loan to “responsible” institutions in search of a prop.5 In November 1980, Cooke’s skull was staged in a Mercer Community College production of Hamlet at West Windsor, New Jersey.6

• This is the kind of board member we need right now.

  To celebrate the “Scottish Play,” join Board President Chris Frost for an exclusive pre-show tasting flight of Scotch from his personal collection.

• Talks roundup: Vivienne Benesch on Measure, Evren Odçikin on As You Like It, Lue Douthit et al. on Antony and Cleopatra, and Carl Cofield, Ty Jones, and Chris Berry on Othello,

• There was an entire West Wing episode about this.

• I would 100% watch a Macbeth with “wizard sisters.”

• Len Cariou on “Epiphany” via :

  See, I had just played King Lear at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. So when I saw “Epiphany,” I said, “Ah, this is Lear on the heath.”

• I’m fine never seeing Holofernes again, but if you must situate him in the history of Renaissance pedants, by all means…

• Benny Hill as Bottom via .

  The trend of casting beloved comedy actors as Bottom continued, and benefitted both Shakespeare and popularized the trope of bad performance.

• Even more Makenzie. (previous)

• As You Like It in Margaritaville.

• Site-Specific Shakespeare (open access)

• Please report back on the Park’s Winter’s Tale bear.

  “The one thing I really didn’t want to do was have a man in a bear suit chasing the actor across the stage. It’s just too funny. It’s possible that Shakespeare wanted it to be rather comic. But we find it rather tragic. So we’re doing it in a way that I think will be somewhat surprising. I’m not going to tell you. People will have to come and see.”

• Susanna Clarke on Virginia Woolf’s happy invalid + Shakespeare.

• 75 years of the Shakespeare Institute.

• Mia Katigbak on Henry VI:

  “People have been asking me, ‘Why the hell Henry VI?’ It’s so problematic,” Mia confessed. “The writing is young, young Shakespeare. I can’t even remember when I got obsessed by it.” It was most likely in class with Frankel. “Everyone was doing the molehill monologue. I read the play and found it fascinating.”

• A new operatic Tempest.

  In his production concept, director Stefanos Koroneos reimagines Prospero as an exiled filmmaker clinging to a crumbling 1980s studio, where the island becomes a memory-scape of film, love, and trauma endlessly re-staged.

• Shakespeare and Jefferson + Quoting Shakespeare in early America7

• Look. I get it. Content is hard. Still, I would be delighted to never see another Shakespeare bracket or “[insert celebrity here] vs. Shakespeare” quiz. Though this is mildly charming.8

  Pericles. It’s one of his last. And he didn’t write it all. So that might have been Wilkins.

• Flamenco in Love’s Labour’s Lost. (more)

• Clocks in Love’s Labour’s Lost.9

  I was initially confused when Genesius Guild's Andy Shearouse explained both the entire plot of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and that the set was designed to represent the inner workings of a broken cuckoo clock. One might think both concepts would be self-explanatory.

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Recommendations

• Letters to Myself.

• Bards on the Bay.

• Acting as prescription.

  I think I was attracted to acting…because…I have this fear that I’m doing the wrong thing…Acting had this kind of very prescribed set of behaviors. I had to walk to this square and cry. And to me it’s cathartic because I get to be emotional and walking to the square, no one’s going to yell at me. I know I’m supposed to walk to that square. That’s where the box of light is and I have to stand in the box of light.

• KA MOUNTAIN. (more)

• Do you like fantasy leagues but hate sports?

• The Monkey Supply Chain via .

• “‘We hired you for your sunshine.’” via

• “It is a thoughtful comma, an intentional comma, a scary comma, a portentous comma, and I love it dearly.” via

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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• 🚨Do you know a fabulous high school teacher who could use $10,000? Are you a fabulous high school teacher who could use $10,000? Nominations for the 2026 Parr Shakespeare Prize are due July 27th at 11:59 P.M and applications are due August 23rd2🚨

  • One of my college professors, the brilliant David Scott Kastan, is once again a judge, and I get to take this yearly opportunity to thank my 7th grade Shakespeare teacher, Jane Mallison. She not only taught me to love Shakespeare, but continues to patiently correct my spelling, a subject she literally wrote a book on.

• Thank you to from #TheatreClique and Maxon Davies from The Shakespeare Forum LA for including Shakespeare News in their newsletters! NY Classical Theatre too!

• Look, get your money, but can we all agree that this is a WILD advertisement?3

  

• Suspicious stags in As You Like It.

  Laoutaris and Arshad present the case that Shakespeare’s representation of a wounded, weeping and ‘sequestered’ stag in the play is a bold reference to the Earl of Essex, an allusion that would have made the play too seditious to print.

• How outdoor Shakespeare copes with heat across the pond.

• What’s your favorite tricolon crescens in Shakespeare?4 via

• Cynthia Nixon on Romeo and Juliet.

• Tennant on Olivier in the Criterion Closet.

• John Wilkes Booth (slightly) misquotes Juliet.

• Macbeth and Much Ado as a pair:

  Both begin with a return from a war and coming back to a domestic space, and explore themes of the military, male culture, the power struggle and the role of women. However, the stories take different turns after their soldiers’ initial welcome home.

• A Macbeth poem and yes, please wear the Globe as a skirt via Edel Semple.

• Benicio Del Toro could have been Tybalt via Ben Broadribb

• Adelaide Neilson thinks Boston an Arden (1872).

• Sharon D Clarke will play Othello at the RSC. (more)

• Ariana Karp claps back.

  Q: I doubt you plan to stage, say, King John.

  A: …I actually LOVE King John — I find it to be a totally relevant political thriller!

• Still no harm in carving a couple into the back of your flats if you’re doing Macbeth. You know. Just in case.

• Love’s Labours and Much Ado as prequel/sequel.

• Lifts are fun.

• “Bos’ Hamlet means well but has his head too far up his ass to actually do well.”

• A “translanguaged” As You Like It.

• Tony Kushner on Steven Spielberg:

  I’ve said many times, the artist that I think he most resembles is Charles Dickens. It’s very easy to condescend to Dickens, but Dickens is a second only to Shakespeare.

• Judi Dench can do two lines of Macbeth and it is still entrancing.

• I am utterly fascinated by Rosalind’s little hat.

• A “mind-altering” Lear and Othello.

• The most important shows from the last 20 years of British theatre via .

  I absolutely loved Ian Rickson’s relatively uncelebrated 2011 Young Vic production of Hamlet and I think I would probably genuinely call it my favourite theatre production of the last 20 years. Its basic thesis was that it was (kind of) set in an asylum and Michael Sheen’s Hamlet was definitely ‘mad’, but it was all incredibly beautiful, there were points where he recognised the destruction he’d wrought in his madness and was devastated by it.

• Bad news from Theater at Monmouth.

• Good news from Shakespeare & Company, the newly formed Georgia Classic Theatre, the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, and Kerrville’s Shakespeare in the Park.

  Merrihew is stepping in at a time of great financial stability, as the organization has recently paid off its mortgage and has experienced strong box office sales over the past two years.

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Recommendations

• Fire-tamers.

• A shoe dyer.

• Andrea Martin.

• Running in armor.

• Shear Madness finally closes.

• How Theatres Choose Plays.

• Queen Elizabeth II’s stunt double’s dress.

• We almost had a Kevin Hart/The Rock Odd Couple.

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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There will be a daily newsletter Monday-Friday this week.

• Check out the 2026-2027 Shakespeare in American Communities grantees. I was a panelist this year and loved it. Sign up to serve, and learn about the incredible work being done across the country. (check out this Midwest artist survey.)

• Is Mamma Mia! actually The Tempest?2

• Isaac Butler on arts funding:

  I'm a lover of Shakespeare, I'm not going to say the government shouldn't fund Shakespeare festivals or Shakespeare programs in schools. The issue is what it stopped funding, which was individual artists, forward-thinking work, revolutionary work, possibly controversial work, artist-run spaces, collectives, all of those things.

• Thank you Mya Gosling for the shout out on the Shakespeare Anyone? podcast.

• JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON LEAR THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

• Richard Gadd tells Claire Danes about writing a paper about her at school.

• A “gothic feminist retelling” of Macbeth is coming to a screen near you.

• Charles Ludlam’s lost Delacorte Titus via .

• Production roundup: Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Othello, and McKellen-as-Lear are all coming back, Venus & Adonis, Lady Disdain, Caesar: The Musical, A Man Called Paris, Dungeons and Shakespeare,3 Two Gentlebots of Verona (yes, these are the same folks who brought you Roswell That Ends Well), The Lady Doth Protest, The Hex Pistols! et al., Falstaff at Palm Beach Shakespeare (mashup of the H4s and Merry Wives) an opera mashup of Otello and a women’s convict ship, have Shakes will travel, The Haus of Montague, Eden Espinosa as Beatrice, James Norton as Hamlet (check out his R2 deposition staged where it actually happened).

  As a student at Cambridge University in 2006, Norton played Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, staged by Robert Icke.

• The folks who got married at Romeo and Juliet. (more + review roundup)

  The play’s tragic ending didn’t deter them. “I hope that’s not an omen,” Wasil said.

• Sara Holdren’s review is brilliant, particularly on Ming Cho Lee…

  I saw him, time and again, distinguish between beauty and function…I once watched Lee stare for a while at a very beautiful model for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: a wrecked ship on a stormy, sandy beach, all shards of timber and gauzy shreds of sails and elegant swoops of rope. Eventually, he said, “Very pretty. But where will Toby and Andrew have their funny scenes?”

• …and how other languages work in this version.

  It makes sense that contemporary theater-makers are navigating a complex relationship to what the cynical call the “Shakespeare-industrial complex” — these are plays written by an English playwright smack-dab in the midst of colonization, imperialism, and enslavement. They are also works in which language is transcendence. To make English implicitly the language of oppression while staging a Shakespeare play is a decision that will come around to bite you in the ass. You’ve bargained away your greatest tool, the building blocks of nuance, of both beauty and function, and what you’ve gained is a onetime-use statement of values.

• Also, Mercutio “gets a big cheer for spray-painting “Abolish ICE” on the wall” but

  Perhaps the most jarring part of the evening is Citizens Bank’s very public sponsorship of Shakespeare in the Park. The financial institution has come under heavy criticism for enabling the for-profit prison industry’s ICE detention centers…The contrast between patron and art calls attention to the bank’s garish attempt at whitewashing.

• The Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion knocks out “honorificabilitudinitatibus.”

• David Sedaris tells Duolingo’s AI his Romeo and Juliet idea. (more)

• We the (Theatre) People

  Plays by Shakespeare—whom Ralph Waldo Emerson described as “the father of the man in America,” despite his being English—were also a staple of the emerging American identity. De Tocqueville remarked “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.”

• “I, Richard, Duke of York, promise…that I shall never do…anything which may cause or lead to the shortening of the natural life of King Henry VI.” (more + a frantic Richard III’s postscript to the effect that Buckingham suuucks.4)

• What does a skeleton giving a thumbs-up have to do with Macbeth? While we’re on posters, these bleeding strawberries are freaking me out.

• More on Stephen King and Shakespeare.

  “King is extraordinarily well-read and literary-minded. I found him citing Emerson in a response to a copyeditor, and “Macbeth” in an early draft of “The Shining.” In his novel “The Long Walk”—which he wrote when he was 17—he quotes Andrew Marvell.”

• The National Theatre’s casting director on Phyllida Lloyd’s Caesar.

  It was just an absolute game changer for me for thinking about how the classic can be presented, and about women in Shakespeare and who is allowed traditionally to play those parts.

• Spots are still available for this $5,000 Hamnet trip.

  On this pilgrimage, we'll look at the coexistence of grief and joy through the characters and plot of Hamnet, delving into the relationships and the themes of how art can move us forward, what it means to live in tension, and how to be a person who carries the sadness of the human condition alongside the enjoyment of life.

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Recommendations

• on new work:

  To say I am in service to the play rather than the playwright is not to diminish the playwright’s authority. The play is theirs. But a play is not made only of conscious intention. It is also made of pattern, accident, pressure, contradiction, rhythm, obsession, and the mysterious material the writer may have smuggled in without knowing it.

• A leech-powered barometer.

• The guy who made the SNL clock.

• Tracy Chapman, varsity soccer player.

• Waistcoats with tiny medieval people and veggies.

• “The Casting Call Was for Zombies. The Job Was Actually a Landlord Rally.”

• The brilliant Tanya Dean’s report on Irish theatre criticism via .

• “…every year on the first Monday after the first Sunday following the 4th of September.”

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

4

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• Please enjoy Pedro Pascal playing with puppies and quoting Polonius. (more Shakespeare puppies)

• Thank you to every single person who sent me the Romeo and Juliet cat.

• A parent in Idaho lost her formal challenge to have this Midsummer removed from the fifth-grade curriculum.

  The story, according to the complaint, includes premarital sex and forced marriage. Also, a character asked a man to treat her like a dog, another woman was ridiculed for her body shape, and a character tried to use a love potion to force someone to love him. “These ideas and attitudes should not be introduced to students who are this young and impressionable,” the complaint states.

• We could have had a Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Festival.

  Edith Sitwell, who remarked that “in repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost. A little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia.” In fact, Monroe had hankered for this role along with, at various points, those of Juliet and Lady Macbeth; read Cordelia opposite Anton Chekhov’s nephew Michael as Lear in an acting class; and even dreamed of mounting a Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Festival.

• Books roundup: Greg Doran’s Walking Shadow, “the Margaret book” (more), a Bard on the Beach bio (more), an OSF conquering-the-canon chronicle, Queer Shakespeare and The Bard in the Borderlands Volume 3 (both open access), Based on a True Story, “Meet Puck: the nonbinary, thirty-year-old mastermind behind Homewreckers…” (more).

• Emma Rosa Went on As You Like It.

  On Monday night, as Oskar and I were talking about that 2007 production of Midsummer, I reminded him that he had said he’d send me a last notes email after our second preview for As You and he never did. He replied, “well we’ve been kinda busy, but I’m still gonna email you.” I protested that the rehearsal period is over and I have no time to make any more changes, and he said, “Oh I know, I’m just interested in the conversation.” Me too, dude. Me too, wherever it goes.

• It is worth watching all the clips of this interview with outgoing Stratford AD Antoni Cimolino. Highlights:

  “…in the theater we are treated often as children by people who are hedge fund managers or bankers because like we like to play and we’re artists and we’ve sort of had an arrested development…there’s always this sense that people in the theater really can’t be grownups, they can’t be responsible. And yet, we set a schedule 18 months ahead of time, and on that Thursday night, the 4th of November at 8:00 we will have a show on.

  • “It all works if you’ve done your work. And if you haven’t done your work, then it’s all shit.”

  • On fight choreo: “…how do we make sure that people aren’t in genuine danger but can always play in a way that stinks of life.”

  • On killing a laugh, designing time, knowing your weaknesses, auteurs, two versions of “that’s too long for a play”, and setting the set on fire.

• Alan Cumming thinks Scotland needs more Shakespeare. (such as)

• Johnna Champion on Charlotte Cushman and barbies.

• What does “salad days” actually mean?

  Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Names” opens with a metaphor that speaks to the inherent capaciousness of salad.

• Montana Shakespeare in the Parks cameos in a Jonathan Franzen story.

  Bromley added a performance the following Saturday night and, without telling Adele, invited a V.I.P. from Bozeman—the artistic director of Montana’s new Shakespeare in the Parks program. After the show, the director asked Bromley to convey to Adele an invitation to audition for that summer’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

• San Francisco Shakes is selling off Antony and Cleopatra props before the production opens. (more)

• Props to the folks making trailers over at OSF.2

• A collaboration between the Folger and a stationery company. (Folio washi tape!)

• The RSC has a new sock and fine leather goods partner. (treat yo self)

• Charles II uses the discovery (maybe) of the Princes in the Tower to dissuade dissent. via .

  Sermons were delivered. People observed a period of mourning. Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play portraying a usurping, murdering king getting exactly what he deserves, was commissioned for a special production. The message sent could hardly have been clearer: people mourn legitimate kings.

• “The hardest thing for me honestly has been the cardio.” (Puck does get about)

• Early music and the RSC.

  …by then he was collecting his own curtals, crumhorns, shawms and more…

• The Winter’s Tale in the park has a cast.

• “Danny, her best friend, dubs her ‘Lady Disdain’”

• Sadie Sink on Juliet.

• Tanya Reynolds would like a crack at Viola.

• “Such Sweet Thunder” by A. Van Jordan.

• Anti-AI in a Manchester Something Rotten. via

• “It is a perfectly acceptable, occasionally thought-provoking and pleasant evening that is unlikely to linger long in the memory.”

• Jessica Stone on The Old Globe.

  [Artistic director] Barry Edelstein gave me the opportunity to direct my first Shakespeare. It was also the first time I directed in the round, and the first time I directed outside. That was a very important training ground for me, and I really fell in love with the San Diego audiences.

• Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens talk Shakespeare.

• Writer/Director Emma Howlett on her Fringe show The Plot. via .

  It is about The Gunpowder Plot. It is about what happens when the stories we tell about the world and our place in it fall apart. It is about angry young men with time on their hands and deep dissatisfaction. It is about two brothers who have bet their lives on a plot and are reckoning with the fact that it has not paid off. It is about who has control of the story that will be told about them. And it is about Macbeth.

• This is a wild way to describe Much Ado.

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Recommendations

• Shipwreck dresses.

• Brueghel bat behavior.

• A-Corps. via .

• “the numbat, the boodie, and Gilbert’s potoroo.”

• on does the Times still matter.

• Nathan Lane thinks Harvey is the play of the moment.

• Smooshing Starburst onto Baltimore sidewalks for science.

• “One chancer, who was stopped at the Russian border….was found to be carrying 1000 lbs of imported cheese. He valiantly claimed personal use…”

  …neither the cheese nor the buyer was ever seen again. The 950 truckles—roughly the weight of a fully grown whale shark—disappeared without a trace.

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Share Shakespeare News

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…and we’re back! There will be a daily newsletter Monday-Friday this week.

Shows seen:

• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare in the Park), As You Like It (Hudson Valley Shakespeare), Othello, Midsummer, and The Tempest (Stratford Festival).

• Not-Shakespeare: The Light in the Piazza and A Streetcar Named Desire (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), Brokeback Mountain (Chicago Shakespeare), An Enemy of the People (TimeLine Theatre), Iceboy! (The Goodman), Guys and Dolls, Something Rotten, and The Importance of Being Earnest (Stratford Festival).

• Plus the concert world premiere of Trusted by the brilliant Aaron Israel Levin and Marella Martin Koch at Chicago Opera Theater.

Quick Links

• 🚨🚨The Amateurs, a Slings and Arrows prequel, is having a one-night-only reading this Sunday and there are still tickets available. Hie thee thither!2 🚨🚨

• While you wait, check out some of the team working through Richard III.

• 🚨Shakespeare & Company is hosting a Fall Festival alumni night on Friday. 🚨

• Hudson Valley’s new theater looks like an animal… (“zoomorphic”) (more)

  Studio Gang managed to fit the Scripps’s 450 seats into just nine U-shaped rows…Why does that matter? Here’s how one of McCallum’s favorite books on theater design explains it: Every theater has a “limit of presence,” the threshold within which actors and crowds feel subconsciously “real” to each other.

• …and the old one had them.

  Nance Williamson keeps a running inventory of memories…playing the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and stashing breast padding made from knee-highs filled with birdseed in a nearby microwave so raccoons wouldn’t get to it…

• Would it had worked.3 (Alas, alas for England)

• H.P. Lovecraft on Mickey Rooney as Puck. (his last letter – “HPL was found collapsed at his desk and in the midst of writing ✍🏻 this letter.”)

• Macbeth in Māori.

  In Māori, we learn, Lady Macbeth’s question to her husband, “Are you a man?”, makes no sense at all, so the translator Te Haumihiata Mason renders it as something roughly meaning “Have you got balls?” – “which is,” Hahn notes contentedly, “exactly what Lady M is asking.”

• Yes to Russian Winter’s Tale I’ve got that matryoshka bear poster ready to go.4

• This is a great article, but there is no way this picture is from Orson Welles’ Macbeth as captioned.5

• Iago making a dart board of Cassio’s face is a pointed choice + I’m pretty sure squirrels would be considered an invasive species on Cyprus.

• “There’s something perversely logical about a director of Othello doubling as the play’s Iago”

• A mask for Titus: “Made by Noh mask designer Hisahito Iwasaki, it combines the face of a demon with that of a grieving person.”

• Hot takes on the most overrated Shakespeare.

• A reminder that Romeo and Juliet with cats is a real movie that really happened and had an absolutely wild (feral?) cast. via Marella Koch.

• “And so to the Duke’s House; and there saw ‘Hamlett’ done, giving us fresh reason never to think enough of Betterton.”

• NY Classical partnered with AARP and Civics is Sexy.

• “I don’t think venereal disease is particularly funny, but he finds it interminably funny.”

• Comical-tragical.

• Cheek by Jowl is doing a Spanish Lear.

• The Greenshow at at Utah Shakes.

• Yup, an Icke-Strong Macbeth is definitely in the works. (previous)6

  “When he asked me, my initial reaction was, it’s done so much,” Strong says. “But as an actor, if you get the opportunity to play the part, you’ve got to play it…”

• And this should be in the works.

  What’s at the top of the wish list?

  Right now, probably Iago in Othello. The psychology of that character is deeply troubling. But, you know, what a part.

• Shakespeare wine-character pairings.

• This Connections was just rude.

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Recommendations

• Fancy pop-ups.

• Singing Gorgons.

• Predicable similes.

• The bus with its own car.

• Mozart gives acting advice.

• The Helpless Case Shirt + he saved the egg shells.

• “It’s actually really hard to connect your scene partner when you’re vibrating…” via

• “In nonprofit theater, women have never held more than 27 percent of leadership positions at LORT member theaters.” via . Also, this. And this.

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and they will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible, however you may still encounter paywalls. There are options. If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Michael Pennington

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Michael Pennington died this month. I saw him onstage once as Lear at TFANA and spent many hours watching him on screen as Oedipus2 and Hector.3 Most obituaries highlight his appearance in Return of the Jedi and the fact he turned down the Jeremy Irons role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman to play Hamlet at the RSC (more). A few feature his Sherlock and oddly hot Timon.

His guides to Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Midsummer are among the best Shakespeare books I’ve ever read.4 If you are doing those plays, read those books. His account (co-written with Michael Bogdanov) of the English Shakespeare Company’s War of the Roses world tour5 should also be on your list. It is full of insights and insane tour stories:6 a stage manager dropping unused ammunition into Hong Kong harbor, a carpenter dropping 20 feet into an elevator shaft in Chichester, two actors + an assistant director rescued by helicopter after two days lost in an Australian bog, the company behaving like “demented millionaires” in East Germany once they realized their per diems (paid in marks) would be worthless outside the country, plus the craziest rehearsal stories this side of Henry IV Part I.7

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• The King rocked up at Tempest.

• The RSC is going on tour. All the cool kids are doing it. (Rob Myles has thoughts.)

• Shakespeare can get your film made.

  “‘Hamnet’ is a story about grief and something terrible happening to a person but it has the hook: it’s Shakespeare.”

• Ncuti Gatwa does a very sexy “to be” on SNL UK via Edel.

• Ophelia: The Perfume.8

  The reason I chose Ophelia for this fragrance is because in Hamlet she's very innocent and young. She doesn't really have much agency and, of course, she had a tragic death.

• Shakespeare on a unicorn, meet Shakespeare on a bronco.

• R&J in rehearsal and in Vogue.9

• Titus, but with 100% more Shakespeare-embodying ravens.

• Muttering sonnets in the quiet car because Claude told you to. (Please don’t.10)

• Police puppies.

  Oberon, Cassio, Horatio and Caesar paid a visit to Stratford as part of their environmental training…

• More Shakespeare, less golf.11

  Davis asked: what would the golfers think if their course were closed to make way for productions of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet?” “I said: ‘They will be very pissed off…’”

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Recommendations

• Point. Counterpoint.

• Funyuns (not) on sale.

• Women at West Point.

• A bus with its own car.

• Pushball and variations.

• Suit the [parable] to the [parchment].

  “Most intriguingly, researchers found a single goatskin page immediately after the biblical parable mentioning a young goat, raising the possibility that medieval scribes may have intentionally matched animal skin to textual content.”

• Hunter S. Thompson tries to fix his DVD player.

• “…are you guys talking about the L.A. underground alt-clown scene?” via Molly.

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and they will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible, however you may still encounter paywalls. There are options. If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it and consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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• Book roundup: The first two Arden Fourths + Thinking Through Shakespeare.

• The apocalyptic £100 million Henry V film starring Michael Caine that never was.

• Rockabye Hamlet (1976) was originally called Something Rockin’ in Denmark. (Also, Kronborg: 1582.)

• “ART ‘used to do 25-person Shakespeares’” or “Wither the Ensemble?”

• The new Hudson Valley Shakespeare theater is exceptionally beautiful.

• Throne of Blood is Oscar Isaac’s favorite Shakespeare on film.

• Reddit roundup: NAATCO’s Henry VI with muppets and Shakespeare temperature blanket advice.

• Much Ado tickets are on sale and the warnings sound like a party.

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• “Come here Jonson you fu–” via many wonderful humans who thought, “Kate will like this.” (I do.)

• on Solo Shakes.

• I don’t understand what this means but it sounds cool and the Swaders make pretty things.

  

• Taraji P. Henson on August Wilson: (archive)

  …it has a certain vernacular that you can’t switch out. The way his words are flowing is melodic — it’s almost like Shakespeare. You got to settle down and listen for a minute.

• Why I love Shakespeare. Why I love theatre. via .

  Carrick’s imaginative interpretations did not hinder the text, they illuminated it…I remember the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as Jimmy Grimes’ Romeo hurled out the line, “Then I defy you, stars!” to the darkening Suffolk sky….I have seen and reviewed a lot (a lot!) of theatre over the last fifteen years, from the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End to Broadway, but I can trace the qualities I value most in shows back to those productions directed by Carrick in Rendlesham Forest

• on Shakespeare’s weather and recreating a “Shakespearean” chamber for Middling Culture.

• Shakespeare-as-UK-tax-incentive could save you a-lot of money.2 (archive)

  Gunton notes that even relatively loose ties to Britain can help accumulate points, such as a project being based on the works of Shakespeare or in the English language. “So even if it’s … an American version of ‘Hamlet,’ entirely theoretical, it’s set in America but we’ve got all the VFX done in the UK, postproduction done in the UK, a British director, a British lead actor and a British composer, suddenly we’ve qualified that production,” Gunton explains.

• “This island’s mine” vs. “Blackstone [1765] goes on to explain that monsters “hath no inheritable blood, and cannot be heir to any land…”

• Chicago Shakespeare will do Midsummer and Winter’s Tale in rep.

• Marin Shakespeare is looking for a muralist to create a “Forward-thinking and Modern: NOT Elizabethan” design for their new theater.

• Someone is going to do this to Shakespeare in 3…2…3

• R&J, the Danish musical.

• Richard II: King, Culture and the Court of Venus via .

• “Can there be murder more foul, strange and unnatural than the murder of one’s own spouse?” Yes. One’s own brother.

• Emma Smith and Kavita Mudan Finn on Henry VI, Part II.

• “With my own tears/hands/tongue/breath” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

• Liberation posted the “moment towards the end of the play that is everything Hamlet seeing the ghost should be…”

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Recommendations

• Implosion carving.

• The Silvesterchlausen.

• Phyllis Diller’s joke file.

• Sled dog puppy cam via James Pitt.4

• Fans of The Met. & National Park Posters.

• Film more theater. (All the cool kids are doing it and it works.)

• “I have had six shows on Broadway…I were reliant on theatre royalties, I would be broke.”

• “The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale.”

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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• NEH not NEA, but it would be great if these folks could get their grants back. (related)

• Who blabbed to Amy Poehler? She’s still on the Shakespeare-Boy-I-don’t-know train but now with bonus Michelle Terry hype!2

• Play On + Idaho, Great Lakes, & Lake Tahoe.

• Production roundup: The Met Macbeth looks real pretty, More McKellen Lear, Othello, Bamlet, both, Butelli as Caesar, backstage at R&J, Kinsmen in a garden, Beyond Bars in Kentucky, Bard in the Bookshop, Bards with Blades, Ophelia: “an immersive audio story thoughtfully designed for sleep”, Pink Ladies of the Sonnets, Measure at The Old Globe, macbitches, and Makenzie:

  …what if the Scottish king was actually a 13-year-old child star at the height of early 2000s TV fame?

• Interview roundup: Joe Fiennes on Shakespeare in Love,3 Fiennes (t’other) and Hare, Rachel Weisz on Bill Nighy’s Edgar, Greg Doran on puppet eroticism, Sarah Day on APT,4 Joe Murphy on Midsummer via and Keiren Hamilton-Amos on Snug, the Mobile Unit’s Rosalind,5 R&J in the Park’s J, Branagh’s Miranda, Lucas Iverson on Cassio (more), and Wendell Pierce on Othello (more).

• Leadership roundup: Kaytlin Mclntyre at OSF, Molly Merrihew at Shakes & Co., Trish Santini at The Old Globe + Emily Trask (an excellent Viola) at Renaissance Theaterworks.

• History roundup: Did Scrope do it?6 + I don’t care what you do as long as “Billy Snakespeare” is never again A Thing.7

• I was already on Team Romeo and Zooliet but the sides are delightful.8 (audition!)

• Shakespeare on Euphoria: “I mean, is there anyone better?”

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Recommendations

• Klimt up close.

• Nope nope nope.

• Typesetting Races.

• Mills & Boon + the NHS.

• The new “tempest in a teapot.”

• “The poor fish tasted of despair…”

• Swiftian snark from beyond the grave.

• “We spent $795.93 on cheese” via .

  kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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Happy Second Birthday Shakespeare News!2

Looking back, it may appear that I started this newsletter because I thought more people should know that if you Dream hard enough, silly string can be clothes.3 Today’s post embroiders that theme. Or at least shoots it out of a can.

Also, I love talking with people about Shakespeare and this is a great way to do that. Thank you for being part of the conversation. Special thanks to the folks who have donated, signed up for paid subscriptions, and bought Hamlet. Your support means I can do more longer posts, like the one below, in addition to link roundups.

Shakespeare is the Met Gala

I recently saw some un-excellent Shakespeare and have been trying to work out how it got that way.4 (Content warning for profanity and excess metaphor.)

The text was spoken casually. Not “I worked hard to make this look easy” but rather “I maybe actually think this is easy.”5 Perhaps the parties in question (who will remain nameless to protect the guilty) were aiming for Castiglione but hit Bartleby instead. They jogged past “unforced” and stumbled on “indifference.” There were no stakes, nothing mattered, and I didn’t care about anyone. I made shopping lists in my head and wished that the characters would die faster.6 And I really like these plays!

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What’s worse is, I think it was done for my benefit. The intent was to make Shakespeare more approachable/understandable. That is an admirable goal. But in attempting to achieve it, they made Shakespeare small.7

I kept thinking of this line:

Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.

The language just kind of…hung there. It didn’t move. It didn’t fit.8 The shoulders were all wrong. Instead of wearing the language, the actors let it wear them.9 It was too casual, like jeans at the Met Gala.10 Can you? Sure. But why would you? You are invited – nay, expected – to wear the world’s wildest scraps/acres of fabric designed by lunatic genius. Rouse yourself! Revel in excess! Luxuriate in possibility!

That’s Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the Met Gala. You could wear red or you could wear %@$#ing incarnadine. Step up, strap in, grab 14 kinds of tape and your scariest friend and take that intensely stupid dress for a ride. None of this slam-on-the-breaks-before-you-even-turn-the-key nonsense. If Shakespeare is not for you, that’s fine. There are so many other modes of transportation. But if you are going to sit in the driver’s seat – I sat there thinking to myself – fucking drive.11

Want something. Want something.12 People bought tickets and got babysitters and put on pants. Float on that full sea. Hug it in your arms. Speak the speech, goddammit.

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• Reviews of Othello, a Britten Midsummer, and Hamlet (via ).

  …the space works for the play’s early court scenes, but its profusion of chairs rapidly turns dangerous. They are energy-sucking butt magnets, and Hastie lets everyone yield to them…

• I did not know there were so many terrible R&J adaptations.

  To say that “Tromeo & Juliet” is in poor taste is an understatement of Shakespearean proportions…this only moderately original, no-budget Elizabethan-inflected film from newbie screenwriter James Gunn (yes, that James Gunn) gets some points…but loses all of them with the revelation that — spoiler alert! — Romeo and Juliet are brother and sister…

• Evan Yionoulis on King John.

  I love King John! …It is just people in political life behaving badly, from lights up to down—and maybe at the end there’s a little redemption, for the bastard anyway…

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Recommendations

• A VR Latin experience.

• 19th c. pre-show meals.

• Instructions for Magical Protection.

• “Sinatra (B) leaned against the bar.”

• The Bicentennial Schlock collection.

• When one crocodile is really sixty-six.

• “One thing money can’t buy, though, is rhythm.”

• “The pain in Spain comes mainly from Elaine” via .

  Get in touch: kate@shakespearenews.com

  © 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.

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• “Welcome to Illyria Cruise Lines!”, “Baton Rouge is in its Shakespeare era”, + Meowbeth.

  …the three witches wave cat-toy wands and stir up a giant sardine tin with a smoke machine that serves as the witches cauldron...

• Was Shakespeare a Swordfighter? via .

  …combat crops up again and again as a hallmark of the Curtain’s long stage. After all, it measured 14 metres lengthwise: the exact same dimensions as a modern Olympic fencing piste.2

• Austin Tichenor on Stephen King + Shakespeare (previous / more) and Sci-Fi Pericles (previous).

• From the Shakespeare News inbox: #1 I am impressed that NAATCO hung on to their 2018 Henry VI email list3 and #2: glad the Hamlet sets arrived at BAM despite “changes in global shipping routes.”

• Emma Smith’s Birthday Lecture. (previously on Twelfth Night)

  “Twelfth Night” shows us Violet and Sebastian as people who have left behind their place of origin, disguised that place in their self-descriptions, arrived in a strange country after a dangerous and traumatic voyage, reinvented themselves with new names, and settled showing courage, resilience, and emotional flexibility in a place that does not recognize their status or talents. That sounds to me like a play about migration.

• Grace Pervades: “a dreadfully dull theatrical hatchet job” vs. “a quirky, anecdotal piece.”

• Translating Shakespeare.

• Macbeth captions, Stewart sonnets, and King Charles quotes Shakespeare.

• The Guardian got lots of mail about their Shakespeare rankings.

  And there’s the bonus of a classic Billingtonian pun (re As You Like It): “you sometimes can’t see the wooed for the trees”.

• “I believe that is the longest stringed-together monosyllabic line in the canon.”4

• “While Macbeth Played, Shots Rang Out” via .

  The real similarity, I realized in the pandemonium of Saturday night, lies in the realms these two leaders have abused and spoiled. A government turned wholly to the pursuit of one man’s ravenous ambition…

• Adjoa Andoh on NPR and in the Guardian.

• Some Led Zeppelin for your Measure pre-show playlist.

• Hamnet the play as “a cynical IP money grab cranked through the widget factory.”

• Teen Hal was not a nice guy. (the arrow-to-the-face didn’t help)

  And there we torched a beautiful home in its park, and all the land around it…and seized a significant gentleman of that place who was one of the chief supporters of Owain. He offered five hundred pounds for his ransom, and he promised to pay the full sum within two weeks if we would spare his life. We did not accept, and he was put to death.

• Struggling through the sonnets via .

• African-American Shakespeare is looking for SF-based volunteers.

• There’s another another RSC in town.

• Which Lost Boys actor is like “Oberon and Puck rolled into one”?

• Ben Donenberg on Merry Wives.

  “I was explaining this to Sir Kenneth Branagh when I was directing him….”

• “Faceless bureaucrat” Jamie Ding read Asimov to prep for Jeopardy.

• Robert Moses was a secret Shakespeare fan?

  And yet, during the Red Scare, Shakespeare really was everywhere….Even Robert Moses, who initially opposed New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park program, could, in private, “recite whole scenes” from the plays.

• Someone reversed a car into Shakespeare’s daughter’s house last October and that might still be a problem.

• Amy Poehler continues to be confused by Shakespeare. (previous / help is available!)

• Kelli O'Hara on Lear.

  It was a strange production of King Lear for sure…It was it was pretty special to me and so I will always wear wear that as a badge of pride and I hope to do many more Shakespeare plays.

• The Alliance for Jewish Theatre resource guide has Merchant advice.

• Sir Rowland was (maybe) historical?

• Can we leave Shakespeare out of it please?

  Lively later learned that the male actor playing the OB/GYN…was one of Baldoni’s close friends. (Baldoni later countered that his friend was “a Shakespearean-trained actor with an MFA in Acting from UCLA.”)

• How to recover from R&J? Puppy yoga.

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Recommendations

• Dueling your roommate is a bad idea.

• Dr. Fauci as Tiresias. (video, previous)

• The Zaporozhian Cossacks respond. (palate cleanser)

• “A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration.”

• “Could she trade the free vasectomy for a box of meat?”5

• How Close To The Stanford Prison Experiment Can A Reality Show Get?

• “The door is on the latch just push” is a legitimately excellent note (via Ben)

• “I really wanted to dislike this because it’s kind of an affront to God and nature. But it’s like, really good.”

  Shakespeare News is a reader-supported publication.

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• Marlowe: The Musical2 via (previous)

  if you have 38 minutes of your life that you don’t need back, you can watch a clip here.

• Production roundup: Pericles in space (photos +props) A “queer Brummie” Midsummer, an off-grid Midsummer at the Globe, “Shakespeare’s Apocrypha Now”, a commedia Much Ado, Hamlet at The Acting Company, “the best case for ‘The Comedy of Errors’ you are ever likely to see”, Lady Macbeth: the ballet, R&J: a new ballet, “The manosphere may get satire-maxxed”, and Tempest on The Golden Hinde via .

• Check out this beautiful list of Shakespeare-ish plays.

• At home with Gielgud via

  With a laugh, he recalls his famous response to Michael Hordern when Mr. Hordern asked him for advice on how to play Lear: "All I can tell you is get a light Ophelia." Oops! He quickly corrects himself: "Cordelia!"

• Zendaya watched All’s Well That Ends Well multiple times? (not new news, but sometimes it’s Winter’s Tale)

• Job alerts: Shakespeare in the Park needs golf cart drivers,3 + someone needs a PA.

• A Mark Strong-Rob Icke Macbeth may be in the works.

  …Strong teases a near-future collaboration with Icke on one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, “Macbeth,” revealing that the director has “got some very strong ideas” about how to uniquely remount the oft-revived show. Also on his wish list are more Shakespearean roles — including Richard III, King Lear, and Iago…

• Don Cheadle does Cassius on Colbert.

• I’m not sure where this music goes in Hamlet but it goes. (more)

• Killing Irish rats with Shakespeare’s verse.

• Kings Like Horses.

  He asked what could be worked out for the entertainment at a big development event at the Prince of Wales’s (now King Charles’s) home at Highgrove. I said what about a reading of Venus and Adonis? In the middle there’s a fantastic verse where Shakespeare’s in a lather of excitement of how beautiful this horse is, so I thought that would go quite down well with this audience.

• Mystery solved! The Shakespeare scholar tortured by Michael Keaton on the set of Much Ado was very likely Russell Jackson, reliable sources say. Now if someone can find the production where Peter Dinklage was bolted to a wall…

• Stealing Shakespeare’s skull. (Maybe.)

• Even without twins, this is always the goal. via

  Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE F*CK”

• Staging Shakespeare at the altar. (previous)

• Are Shakespeare’s Commas Really That Important?

  Regarding the second, in the line “it had a dying fall,” Ádám is mitigating the fact that Hungarian doesn’t have any equivalent to an “it has” in a case like this, so he plugs the gap by here giving the fall a second adjective. It is not merely dying, but szép—beautiful. It’s beautiful comma dying.

• Shakespeare at the UN. (Titus in French is GREAT)

• “A voiceless Richard III would be a clown.” -H.P. Lovecraft

• Wendell Pierce on names.

  I mean you just take Othello. In the middle of his name is the word, “hell.” Othello is in the midst of hell because he doesn’t trust his lovely Desdemona. And in the middle of her name is “demon.”

• Rebecca Heminges + The King’s Women via Edel Semple.

• “I dunno, maybe Midsummer *is* the best.” (+on -er vs. -re via )

  I saw an outdoor production in Oak Park, Ill., decades ago, utterly conventional/traditional, from the Elizabethan costumes to the piped-in Mendelssohn, and it's one of my greatest theatrical experiences.

• “I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but –”

• Why do we need new editions of Shakespeare’s plays? (more Titus here and here)

• A hell of a leek smack. (background)

• You’re the Topps.

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Recommendations

• Jellyfish helmets.

• Mail-order magic.

• Queens playing Queens.

• Paul Child’s judo notes. (archive)

• Brecht’s Red X4 via

• I’ve seen better bears in Winter’s.

• “Pan of Beans Plays ‘Ave Maria’”5

• Wrap me in ships and sell me time.

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Third and lastly, you can support both myself & the brilliant Mya Gosling by buying our previously-sold-out-and-newly-back-in-stock Stick-Figure Hamlet comic book.2

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• Please commemorate the day by supporting my formal petition to add Roger Rees’ Macbeth sweater to the fisherman patheon currently housing Billy Crystal as Harry and Chris Evans in Knives Out.3 (more)

• The Shakespeare Plays You Need to See and Every single Shakespeare play – ranked!4

• Of Course Hamlet Is Everywhere Right Now.

• Not everything lives up to the hype, but Romeo and Juliet and Godzilla does.5 (more)

• on “Sleep No More” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) and good notes:

  “Right, so that’s lovely. But it’s not what we need. You’re giving us Mr. Bean and we want James Bond. Can you do that?” …It was the kind of note I love: abstract, but clear. Playable. Long and short…

• The Open Source Shakespeare birthday hat is an annual delight.

• This SAT alternative focused on “Western literature” sucks, and their author profile of Shakespeare is wrong.6

• Sofa Shakespeare.

• Puck and the Changelings. (WBAGNFARB) + sets as “durational art.”

• Birthday celebration include four new Shakespeare-inspired plays from Cry Havoc and The Shakespeare Exchange + Pint Night in Montana.

• The Life, Death and ‘Afterlife’ of Henry VI (virtual, 9am EST tomorrow)

• Tolstoy and Orwell spat over Lear.

  But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”

• Picture of Nobody (1936)

  It is Falstaff who eventually connects Shakespere to the powerful editor Rosencrantz…

• Auditions for breakdancing Shakespeare are open. (as previously seen on)

• “I think we should teach Shakespeare, but only as theater…”

• The nunnery discourse continues:

  …he is basically telling her to leave him alone and break up with him, but also kind of being really horrible and mean and saying ugly things. There’s a lot of different possibilities as to what’s going on.

• Wishbone Shakespeare! (origin story)

• Ian McKellen on Michaela Coel:

  Well, that’s because we’re Romeo and Juliet, you see.

• “Or close the [rotating] wall up…”

• Colorado Shakes goes back outside.

• Merry Wives at Chicago Shakes (more)

  The online program for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” begins with a puzzling, and arguably dead-wrong note from director Phillip Breen. It reads “There are no jokes in Merry Wives…”

• Das Wintermärchen by William Shakespeare.

• Changeling lore via .

• The Woman Who Brought Shakespeare to Lisbon via .

• Emma Stebbins.

  …she created innovative and powerful sculptures while living in Rome with her wife, the renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman…

• “You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart” as an alexandrine.

• Green sickness, Hamnet and Virgil, and humility in Taming.

• Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Antony in The Play Pictorial (motto: “Not for a day, but for all time”) (more Tree + rabbit Midsummer)

  It is an easy task for the pedant and the crank to find fault with Mr. Tree’s method of treating Shakespeare…

• Cymbeline with Kim Gilchrist and Emma Smith.

• Naked baby Shakespeare.

• Farah Karim-Cooper’s children’s book via .

• Pulp! The Classics Romeo and Juliet.

• Family fun at Bothworth! via Londonist

3

I mean. C’mon.

Shakespeare’s London House Exactly Where We Thought

Ah, the sweet smell of Shakespeare news in April. In honor of Shakespeare’s death/maybe birth day on April 23, there is often exciting Shakespeare-shaped news released around this time. Last year’s was “Shakespeare Slightly Less of a Jerk Than Previously Believed (Maybe)” which continues to be this newsletter’s most popular post, so let’s crack on with the 2026 edition.

Professor Lucy Munro has identified the exact location of the property that Shakespeare bought in London in 1613. He already owned a nice pile in Stratford, but had always been a renter in London.

Shakespeare bought the “dwelling house or Tenement with th’appurtenaunces” near St. Paul’s for £140. The property was previously leased to a haberdasher,2 Shakespeare bought it from a minstrel,3 and rented it to a printer.4 The site was previously a Dominican friary (so, probably haunted) and “substantial enough to have been divided into two houses by 1645.” Plenty of room to pace or crumple paper in a sexy/disheveled manner if he ever did live/work there, which is not known. Shakespeare (co-)wrote Two Noble Kinsmen around this time, so it is tempting to imagine him looking out at London and muttering:

This world’s a city full of straying streets,
And death’s the market-place where each one meets.

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There was some legal chicanery over who inherited the property after Shakespeare’s death, but it eventually ended up in the hands of his granddaughter. She sold it one year before it burned in The Great Fire, along with much of the City and a bunch of (Third) Folios.

Since 2013, there has been a blue plaque on 5 St Andrew’s Hill stating that Shakespeare “purchased lodgings in the Blackfriars gatehouse located near this site.” This information wasn’t “lost” or particularly “‘missing,’” but it wasn’t well-known.

As taglines go, “The Victorian Warehouse Where Two Noble Kinsmen Was Written (Maybe)” will never have the same ring as “Shakespeare’s Birthplace.”5 But it is nice to have a new spot to visit, and serendipitous that the plaque ended up in the right place, like Thaisa at the Temple. If you would like to experience the neighborhood as it was in Shakespeare’s day, it is important to know that his house was next to a pub.6

It is still next to a pub.

See you there.

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Quick Links

• Yuvika Tolani will be the first permanent artistic director of Seattle’s Union Arts Center. (previous)

  “When I was moving to Seattle, I saw news of the merger, and said, ‘Oh, a contemporary theater is merging with a Shakespeare theater — this is the one I’m going to keep my eye on.’”

• Lesley Malin and Scott Helm endow WashU’s Shakespeare summer program.

  “Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest humanist of all time,” said Malin, a founder and producing executive director of The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Maryland’s leading proponent of classic theater.7

• SoCo Creamery has Shakespeare flavors.8

• Laurence Olivier on Mastermind.

  Which Italian producer financed Olivier screen adaptation of Henry V, Olivier later gifting him the special Oscar he’d received for the film?9

• That time the Pope accidentally stole a Folio.

  At the end of the recital one of the actors, Dorothy Tutin, impulsively held up the First Folio to be blessed by the pope who, misunderstanding the gesture, treated it as a gift and handed it to a cardinal to add to the Vatican vaults.

• “Our director exited, to a shed outside, caressing vodka.”10

• Debra Hanson on genius. (previous)

  …an actor can have all of the education, all of the brains, all of the humanity, all of the understanding of what Shakespeare is saying… all of the technical things that have been taught and they can go on stage and they can’t do a damn thing. And then you get other ones who have no sense of decorum…they’re not interested in reading…and they get on stage – they’re like transmitters – something unworldly comes out of them.11

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• “It was here, on the notorious tiger skin rug, that the passionate love

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• Riz Ahmed Hamlet roundup: “bold but empty,” “shaky,” “brief.” (clip)

  I always say Shakespeare is not dead. He’s been kidnapped. You know, kidnapped by the establishment, kidnapped by intellectuals.

• My Little Titus Andronicus is a real play that you can really do. (h/t Aili Huber, send your west-central Virginia high school students to audition)

  This is where you drag off one of the ponies and chop off his head.

• A homeschool pirate Tempest, “Duke Orsino is looking for the Britney to his Justin,” a sporty R&J, Hamlet in Antigone in Analysis + Catskill Shakespeare.

• Travel-as-process.

  As Cruz began the writing process, she journeyed to the Hebrides, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland, to visit Macbeth’s grave and pay her respects.2

• When Shakespeare Took On Joe McCarthy.3

• Greg Doran on Antony Sher and his new book + Venus and Adonis with puppets.

  Sher wanted to die at their home in Stratford, with its floorboards salvaged from the RSC stage and walked on by Olivier and Gielgud…

  “On the last day, he was so determined not to stay in bed, even though he couldn’t stand up. Before he lost his marbles, he’d quote Othello, ‘If it were now to die,/ ‘Twere now to be most happy…’”

• Margaret Webster as a directing foremother via . (more)

• Shakespeare and Stephen King, or What Does Juliet Have to Say About Carrie?

• An “underrated early modern plays” conversation on reddit.

• “…it’s difficult to make Shakespeare more efficient…”

• Patrick Ball on the audiences of tomorrow:

  The American repertory theater model, the Guthries, the Oregon Shakespeare Festivals…is reliant on an older subscriber base. When I was doing “Hamlet” in LA, having a bunch of young women in their 20s on Twitter excited about a Shakespeare play is really fun for me.

• A new Lauren Gunderson play. (more)

• Get thee to NYC, Borachio/Claudio and Margaret understudies, get thee to NYC.

• Kelly Clarkson is stunned by Shakespeare (repeatedly).

• Naeem Hayet (one of the Globe to Globe Hamlets) on Headlong.

• It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Fringe Festival must have Shakespeare in it. NYC’s includes The Last Audition and Walter Schlinger’s Romeo and Juliet.

• The Historical Shakespeare Editions website is amazing. (h/t Eric Johnson)

• Saheem Ali on Shakespeare via .

• “There’s a really intense closeness between Rosalind and Celia that could read as queer — but they’re cousins. So it’s like…do we lean into that or not?”

• on Measure and Loathly Lady poems.

• An iambic tattoo via .

• on 12 Ophelias + The Booth Variations + a Latinx Winter’s Tale.

• Midsummer in Summerfolk via .

• San Pedro’s Shakespeare in the Park will be free next season.

• All the RSC H5s.

• “The owl was a baker’s daughter” story is super dark.

• “A little touch of John-John in the night.”

• Shakespeare gardens + Shakespeare’s Windsor.

• …and this dog, our dog (boola boola)

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• The Queen’s red coat.

• Robert Wilson’s Messiah.

• Paleontologists + tequila + a paleo-stoveologist.

• “A theater actor told me how his group’s production of George Orwell’s 1984 had been called off following this event.”

• “…how do we, as both—whether we are artists or we are producers—judge our own work in the present, in real time, as we’re making it?”

2

There is an incredible history of 19th c. Shakespeareans traveling to research their productions. My favorite is Hawes Craven who went to Scotland with Henry Irving to research Macbeth and ransacked the British Museum for inspo. He did not, however, have a Dracula character named after him, unlike other Irving favorites.

The word of command with respect to the production of Macbeth first went forth in the month of July…the scenery was finally entrusted to Mr. Hawes Craven…searching the British and South Kensington Museums for authority for every article of costume, weapon, furniture, and domestic utensil-down to every nail, and button, and blade…Thus it comes about that the vessels in use in the banqueting-scene, for example, are all of them of correct design. They are exact counterparts of originals in the British Museum, while the patterns for some of the embroideries come from an eleventh-century cope at South Kensington…

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• Romeo and Juliet reviews. (more) (on star Shakespeare)

  After the couple’s tragic demise, three more performers take the stage, representing an older Romeo and Juliet and a daughter, allowing us to glimpse the life they might have had.

• Why do Juliets often outshine their Romeos? (the exception)

• Thank you to the folks who wrote in about Drunk vs. Sh!tfaced Shakespeare. The consensus seems to be that Sh!tfaced is UK-based and the parent/original of Drunk, which is US-based and possibly “a ripoff”? Also meaningful. Still curious.

• Colman Domingo does Midsummer on Hot Ones.2

• The history of Faerie Smut™ goes through Midsummer. (more) (fairies, not smut)

  …many productions emphasise the fairies' erotic potential. A 1999 RSC production directed by Michael Boyd was so sexually charged that a school party left at the interval.3

• Oh, I have so many thoughts about the performative girlboss aesthetic of this.4

• “Lavinia has been on my mind…”

• Shakespearean Six-Sevens and and Giddy Minds via Good Tickle Brain.

• Oh. Oh no.

  “Macbeth” is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding…Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form…

• When Gertrude’s brother is a meteorologist.

• Jack O'Brien on Two Shakespearean Actors.

• Production/reading roundup: R&J and Joni, a new musical, Hamletta & Twelfth Bro, Out, Darn Spot!, Richard III: A Twisted Fairy Tale, “A queer take on a Shakespearean classic,” “Fakespeakeare,” Midsummer at OSF, Complete Works, La Plaza Hamlet (more), and Mugen-Noh Othello in the Biennale. (more)

• Bate on Bloom. via

  …the notion that he single-handedly invented the art of self-discovery through dramatic monologue is grossly condescending to his predecessors in the imaginative exploration of the human condition…

• Shakespeare on The Traitors. (as previously seen on)

• The lady sings in…Børk! Børk! Børk!

• Related: The Globe Research team has joined Reddit. (More of this please.)

• Willy Loman is longer than Lear? (STET)

• Free books! Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile + Shakespeare and the Senses.

• “Hamlet’s ‘majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ was King’s chapel roof…” (past)

• Agatha Christie and Shakespeare via .

  The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good.

• The APT design conference sounds like heaven.

• Plates and swords (x2) as teaching tools.

• Othello, the ballet.

• “…a 16-year-old has somehow perfected ‘Put out the light and then put out the light.’”

• “The dog will be handled by a tall, male actor who is wearing a hat, so it’s important that we check in to make sure that’s going to be okay for the dog…”

• “One might say that Hamlet is having a moment were it not for the fact that Hamlet often seems to be having a moment.”

• Cool, why is the picture (bad) AI?

• Judi Dench on changing her mind.

• Nikitin’s Hamlet. (2016) via

• Krymov’s Hamlet. (2016)

  Volkov played Claudius and the Ghost brilliantly. He died suddenly and we played the last performance without him, in his honor…We had filmed one show, so we had a recording of his voice and even his footsteps on stage. So we played that last show without Volkov but with the sound of his voice and footsteps. A couple of times we projected his face on a screen, but nothing more. And his final exit was the sound of his feet as he left. That was an astonishing show. I’ve never heard such silence in a theater.

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• How Many Artists Are There in the U.S.?

• An upside down “h.” via

• Did Bette Davis Have A Vision Board? via

• “How does someone remove someone’s confidence?” (more)

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• 30 years of Romeo + Juliet.

• Why Are Theater Tickets So Much Cheaper in London Than New York?

  Last season, “Romeo + Juliet,” whose stars — Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler — appealed to young audiences, charged $1,478.50 for the best seats in its final days.

• “I’d love to do a female Hamlet. I think that’d be so fun. Well, not ‘fun’, really, but you know…”

• “What biscuit would your character be?” (R&J edition)

• “Hamlet, while an excellent play, is not a good stand-up set.”

• Henry V reviews + photos.

  Natalie Kimmerling wins our affection as his daughter Katherine, yet it’s hard to understand why her lesson in English vocabulary now takes place over the bodies of wounded soldiers who groan and wince every time she prods at different parts of their bodies.

• “The fact that it’s Shakespeare that I’m winning for feels important.”

• Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the dance. (more + images)

• Fresno’s first professional Shakespeare company.

• Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies as an example of “all theatre should be less than two hours or more than five.”

• A Malaysian Macbeth.

• I’m a huge fan of bloody-fingers-as-crown Macbeth.2

• Ayad Akhtar’s Keynote at the Milwaukee Theater Leader Summit. (more + report)

  Joe Papp was a trainer of “audiences” par excellence. He put Shakespeare in Central Park and made it free. When Robert Moses tried to force him to charge admission, Papp fought him publicly and won. The principle wasn't charity—it was a conviction that the audience for serious theater was vastly larger and more diverse than anyone assumed, and that the barrier was access, not taste.

• American Theatre Magazine remembers playwright Don Nigro, “the finest playwright you never heard of.” His work includes The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It, Sycorax, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, and Henry and Ellen.

• Sara Bruner interviewed by Lue Douthit in SDC Journal:

  One essential thing for me with Shakespeare plays is that we try to approach them like they’re brand new...Eva Le Gallienne famously went into rehearsal for “Romeo and Juliet,” sat down, and said, “This is a new play by a new playwright, it’s called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by William Shakespeare.”

• “The Summer Oath,” an audio adaptation of Love’s Labor’s Lost starring Maya Hawke comes out next month.

• “Look, one of the things that you could do now that will escape you in five years is Juliet.”

• Ian McKellen on what Shakespeare teaches.

  I am capable of murder. I now realize because I’ve imagined what it’s like to be Macbeth and I realize I am capable of that. Doesn’t mean to say I do it, but I’m capable of doing it.

• “Romeo is hella cringe.”

• Betsy Golden Kellem on 19th c. theater.

  The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago.

• The RSC has cut their head of music. (more)

• Understudying at the RSC.

• “You wouldn’t necessarily think As You Like It and King Lear are in tight conversation with each other, but they are.”

• John Payne Collier’s faked Second Folio + Nina Conti on the RSC.

  I was furniture really. I was called play-as-cast which means you just sort of get the odd bit to do. I did play Audrey in “As You Like It” …and I was the Courtesan in “Comedy of Errors” …I didn’t have very much to do on stage and that did make me mischievous and it did make me want to do something more and that’s when I became a ventriloquist actually.

• At least the Kennedy Center closing is having some knock-on good?

  A spokeswoman for the Shakespeare Theater Company, not far from the White House, said that it was on pace to have one of its highest-selling seasons ever…

• A sight-line magic sheet is a brilliant idea.

• Laurie Maguire on Caesar:

  You can’t make him a kind of nakedly ambitious fascist kind of stereotype. Otherwise, you take away all the complexity and difficulty of Brutus’s decision.

• Matt Lewis argues for the Richard III-as-Cecil theory.3 via

  Ultimately, Richard is the architect of his own demise, and I believe that Shakespeare was offering a warning that Robert Cecil would become the architect of the downfall of the Tudors, and that Elizabeth was allowing it to happen.

• Emma Smith on Richard Oswald’s rare books. (who?)

  …because unlike many provenance names, Oswald’s is distinctive, it is everywhere from large to small institutions, in digital archives, through the auction houses and book dealers. It is like a dye trace in the special collections’ water system. And because it is so ubiquitous, it offers a new model for considering the legacies of the past in the present.

  This isn’t a tiny violin problem for places like the Folger Shakespeare Library or the Huntington, although they’re also included in its reach. Oswald’s books offer instead a snapshot of how collections and systems of value created by, paid for by, the slave economy have percolated across our libraries and special collections almost invisibly, but there in plain sight.

• Shakespeare at Notre Dame does Texas.

  …as Jo, Benjy and I were in the midst of the banishment scene I realised that the student who had worked on it and performed it in the curtain-raiser earlier were mouthing the lines along with us, like Shakespearean karaoke.4

• Current Hamlet Ralph Davis was a child actor at the RSC in King John and Richard III.

• Jeffrey Sweet on Jules Feiffer’s play, The White House Murder Case in The Dramatist Quarterly:

  I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated Shakespeare, “King John,” which predicts Richard Nixon.

• Mirrors in Shakespeare.

• Ruskin on the thing itself via .

• Shakespeare and the streetlight effect via .

• Annotated scripts are the best.

  The most surprising thing to be revealed is that I’m surprised to be loved.

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• How old is Nick exactly? via .

• Chromolithography, Or “Alois Senefelder just wants to print his plays.”

• “…hot, sexy, dangerous boys—central to virtually all young adult romance novels—cannot be copyrighted.”

2

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• Production roundup: The Two Gentlemen of Killarney, a Romeo reboot, NAATCO’s Henry VI at the Public, Coriolanus with “a Heated Rivalry moment,” fourth-grade circus Shakespeare, “The secret lives of Windsor wives,” As You Like It with a “neglected unicorn,” a Korean Lear (“The Fool…is replaced in this production by a turtle”), a queer 1970s NYC Macbeth, a D&D Macbeth, Irish Macbeths, + an “inspired but insane” Macbeth.

• Jane Lapotaire has died. She rode into the Globe on a horse and “half attacked” Michael Dobson with her handbag, but I will always think of her saying “pyramids.” (bonus: Branagh’s Hamlet’s invisible dog.)

• Nataki Garrett is the interim artistic director of African-American Shakespeare. More at .

• “Here’s the hardest thing about Shakespeare: what the hell are you saying?” (related, via )

• Hudson Valley and Shakespeare in the Park have casts. (Deirdre O’Connell’s Nurse should be a sight to see.)

• Shots at Chalamet (does he still want Hamlet?): Jonathan Bailey + The Library for the Performing Arts + Josh Johnson with the best take of all:

  …sometimes we do the same thing that I at least think Timothée was doing when he said that, which is we confuse commerce with creativity.

• I always enjoy proper scholars reviewing dumb things.2

• The Shakespeare, Anyone? podcast won the SAA Publics Award.

• Hamnet roundup: on SNL UK, to sob or not? (via Edel Semple), Chanel sonnets, a “very expensive” earring, what does “quietus” actually mean? + Dana Stevens on adaptation:

  The shift in medium from prose to film might seem to offer some advantages for a project that sets out to explore the gaps in a historical figure’s life story; with its ability to suggest interiority through wordless imagery, cinema can evoke mystery without attempting to explain it. But the long history of Shakespearean biofiction on-screen tells a different story—one of imaginative spaces crammed to the brim rather than left provocatively open…

  …Another scene shows the young author already workshopping Hamlet’s future last words—“the rest is silence”—years before the personal loss that supposedly inspired them. What grates about these moments is how, like the conventional Shakespeare biopics before it, Zhao’s film drains the mystery from the relationship between art and life. Is the implication that Shakespeare was born with his complete works already inside his head, like eggs waiting to hatch? If his authorship is simply a matter of incubation—if the experiences we’re watching him live through are not in fact formative—then why bother dramatizing his life at all?

• Related: You have one day left to download Katherine Scheil’s “Anne Shakespeare’s Epitaph” for free + the other Anne is in on the joke.

• Help brainstorm a Shakespeare bachelorette party.

• From pre-dentistry to Macduff. More + “When you have a matinee performance, but you still have a theatre to run”3

• Share your favorite character for a chance at $250 in books.

• On the unfinished Plummer Lear film + Titania: “every flower has a stem.”

• Nora Polley on Richard Monette’s Taming:

  It really was an extraordinary extraordinary show…even today when you can see the sun and the moon in the same sky, I always think of that show.

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• Tolkien wanted Auden to leave him the &#$% alone.

• American Girl had (has?) a theater wing?! via .

• The rise of the concept snack, 600 tubs of French onion dip, + sky meat. (paging )

• On theater as service (“what wouldst thou?”) vs. “self-therapy with an audience present.” via + Staying alive: How L.A.’s big 3 theaters plan to do it

• If you didn’t grow up singing Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” in the car, there’s still time to learn.4

• A play written at the South Pole:

  Another guest, Mr. Nincompoop Poodlefaker, writes off Antarctica entirely…

• Helen Shaw on critical origins:

  It makes a big impact on a kid that there are certain sanctioned activities where you are allowed to break stuff. Interesting, I thought, as I mashed potatoes into the carpet.

3

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A quieter week for Shakespeare News, other than Jessie Buckley being adorable. Enjoy these bits and bobs from the last month, we’ll be back next week with the newest news.

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• Bridgerton roundup: Benedict’s look for the masquerade is based on Shakespeare, plus your annual reminder that Luke Thompson took over Edgar in the Ian McKellen Lear from Jonathan Bailey (at work).

• It was recently brought to my attention that in addition to all the Hamlet in-jokes in the National Theatre production (coming soon to a BAM near you), Hamlet also wears a t-shirt with a reference to Christopher Marlowe’s recreational preferences.2 Excellent/Terrible news: you can buy the shirt.

• Skeans, the traditional Irish knives of kerns and gallowglasses. (Huh?) (Yes, please, give Macmorris one of the long ones. “I will cut off your head” with one of these in hand is a real threat.)

• Utah Shakespeare Festival started in a laundromat.3

• Adam Long on the history of the Reduced Shakespeare Company.

  "People often say to me, oh, is Reduced Shakespeare supposed to be the antidote to boring Shakespeare? And the question just always flummoxes me because I've never seen anything that I consider to be boring Shakespeare.”

• An Irish scholar’s lost Hamlet book.4

• Ellen Terry’s locked photo album + Henry Irving’s Hamlet sells baking powder (“to bake or not to bake”)5 via The Folger & Colleen Kennedy.

• A Deaf Tempest. (more)

• Chesapeake Shakespeare’s online Ira Aldridge exhibit.6 (more online exhibits, please!)

• Jon Bernthal played Lodovico in Othello at A.R.T. in 2001.

• OSF’s Director of Repertory Producing.

  “Producing in rotating rep is like an elaborate dance,” she said. “If someone goes out of step it can set off a chain reaction throughout the company. Part of my job is to build a safety net so the house of cards doesn’t fall if one card comes out of place.”

• Some tights + codpiece ensembles simply can’t be unseen.

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As You Like It Sidebar

• Peg Woffington collapsed on stage during As You Like It in 1757 but at least she was almost at the end?

• A 1908 As You Like It featuring three live deer.

• A 1879 As You Like It featured a stuffed deer. When the deer was omitted in later productions it caused “the outrage of locals.”

• Olivier’s first Shakespeare on film. (1936), “the first ever outdoor performance of Shakespeare in America” (1903), and marking Orlando as an outsider by making him “the only character at court who wears jeans.” (more)

Don’t Do This

Almost every Ophelia I’ve met has a story about Hamlet deciding “in the moment” to add a little extra violence into the nunnery scene. You know, because Hamlet was really feeling it that day. Why anyone continues to think this is an acceptable thing to do, let alone joke about on a podcast, continues to be utterly beyond me.

I did Hamlet a couple years ago – I was playing Hamlet – and during the “get thee to an nunnery” sequence I frequently would kick Ophelia’s book across the stage towards her…and for some reason, during one of the shows, I decided I would just pick it up and throw it in her direction.

Now, this wasn’t me thinking about it as like a strategy. This is just something that happens in the moment. And so, because it’s not a nice scene. It is a very, if you like, it is arguably an abusive scene. Actually, I think it’s pretty unarguably an abusive scene. But anyway, but it wasn’t a violent scene the way we were doing it. And I picked up this little book..and I flung it in her direction. Hit her straight in the leg. Really hard, like it was a straight line.

And I just saw in her eyes… “Oh fuck you dude.” But of course Hamlet does not then say, “I’m sorry Ophelia, let me rethink every decision I’ve made.” No, no, Hamlet if anything is even meaner as the scene goes on so I just kept going…the show must go on,7 and we did the rest of the scene, and the whole time she was, like, burning holes in my face with her eye lasers8…and then backstage – backstage I went up to her and I was like, “Oh god, I’m so fucking sorry.” She of course was like – I said – well she was like – she was like, “Yeah it’s fine, I know you didn’t mean to, but please don’t.”9 But yeah. Sometimes mistakes10 can breathe life into a scene11 in a really unexpected and terrifying way.12

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Interested in The Elfin Sprite, the “serio-comic legendary fairy tale” advertised alongside Aldridge’s Othello? Bad news: it is Bad. But the tiny book it comes it is adorable!

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Happy Ides of March! St. Patrick’s Day is on Tuesday, here’s a bonus for those of you celebrating both. Beware and take care.

St Patrick’s Day vs the Ides of March, How Are You Celebrating?

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Traditional observance:

St Patrick’s Day

Go out with 1.2 million friends.

Ides of March

Stay home.

Traditional symbol:

St Patrick’s Day

Four-leaf clover.2

Ides of March

Two-faced friend.

Traditional color:

St Patrick’s Day

Green.

Ides of March

Crimson.

Traditional activity with color:

St Patrick’s Day

Dye rivers.

Ides of March

Die, tyrant!

Traditional beverage:

St Patrick’s Day

Beer.

Ides of March

The bitter waters of Lethe.

First person you will not listen to:

St Patrick’s Day

The wife.

Ides of March

The wife.3

Second person you will not listen to:

St Patrick’s Day

Policeman with pettable horse.

Ides of March

Soothsayer.

Location of snakes:

St Patrick’s Day

Not Ireland.

Ides of March

Behind you with a knife.

Famous last words:

St Patrick’s Day

“One more beer.”

Ides of March

“Et tu, Brute.”4

What will finish you off:

St Patrick’s Day

One more beer.

Ides of March

Brutus.

Result:

St Patrick’s Day

Your insensate body.

Ides of March

Your insensate body.

Many thanks to my brilliant brother5 for the punch up and “pettable horse.”