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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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• 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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• Lighting Pompeii.

• 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

2

5

6

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.”

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• Shakespeare in the original Klingon + Patrick Stewart does the sonnets.

• Margaret Qualley as Juliet2 and Millepied’s “Romeo and Juliet Suite.”

• Guess the Shakespeare Play from the Translated Title: Money Talks in a World in which Cherry Blossoms are in Bloom.

• Shakespeare in the Paston letters: inheriting Sir John Fastolf’s castle, fighting Jack Cade and chopping Suffolk’s head off. via .

• How can you not love an Ophelia mad scene that lasts an entire act? (TIMOTHÉE)

• If an actor is playing more than one role, consider telling them. via Ben Broadribb

• Lady M survives the fire.3 (detail)

• When god gives you two sets of twins, make a Comedy. (more / streaming)

• Ah, student matinees.4

  At one point, during the “Now might I do it” soliloquy, Hamlet consulted the crowd…High young voices bayed for Claudius’s blood — We’ve considered the theological ramifications and you should go for it! is what I think they were screaming — but Hamlet eventually talked them around.

• The Brits call the “Hokey Pokey” the “Hokey Cokey”?! (Oh yes, and some Rosalind thoughts.)

• “Macbeth with Sword”

• Pete Townshend asked Steven Burkov for his autograph. (Burkov wrote a one man show about Shakespeare’s villains. No, not that one. The other one.)

• “At the time, I was one of three people employed in British theatres who had the title ‘dramaturg’. The other two were Paul Sirett at the RSC…” via

• Alfred Enoch on Henry V. (more)

  …if you’re standing outside a town and threatening violence, and the people inside think you’re just talking, what’s the point?

• Play On partners with Ojai for four new translations.

• Farah Karim-Cooper on academic publishing:

  …aside from the students assigned my essays and books, there were probably only about 12 people who would read them.

• “I'm just so happy they all look so bad.”

• “How much narrative clarity do we want or need from Shakespeare?” via .

• Sam Heughan would have Shakespeare to dinner.

• Joanne Freeman on Martha Andresen’s Shakespeare class. (more)

• Reviving the Shakespeare Ladies Club.

• “…a gyrating stripper Paris.”

Podcast Sidebar

• Hilary Mantel’s Reith lectures (from Middle Temple Hall)

  I loved Shakespeare and I began reading Shakespeare very early, and I knew it was very important to me but I don’t understand why I didn’t elect to study it because I could very happily have spent my life that way. But I think it was only when I came to Stratford on that trip that I realized that there were people who spent their whole lives studying Shakespeare.

• Ada Palmer and Jo Walton on director Jane Howell and the BBC History Plays.

• Ethan Hawke on losing his place in Henry IV after seeing Tom Stoppard in the audience.

• Gary Parr on Julius Caesar, his 10th grade English teacher, and the Parr Prize for Excellence in Teaching Shakespeare.

• Julia Quinn was in All’s Well in high school but still needs to see/read Hamlet.

• Ronan Hatfull on drolls on the Reduced Shakespeare podcast.5

• “Okay, I was going to bring up lesbian Othello…” via .

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Recommendations

• Tiny books.

• Ostrich egg water bottles.

• Mark Twain’s contribution to bra history.

• How much is that screech owl in the window?

• Queer Cyrano. (it’s a trend?) + Gentleman Jack, the ballet.

• The dark Satanic Mill and “Surprise beef in notebook!” via

• UK folks can donate (800+ year old) family papers instead of paying tax.

• If you thought Apollinaire’s shell ring was neat, check out Napoleon’s cannonball scarab.

2

This framing isn’t wildly legible, but sure.

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• Jonathan Groff will play Rosalind for the Royal Shakespeare Company.2

  Evans sent the actor an email after visiting him in Just in Time, inviting him to play Rosalind. “And I wrote him back,” Groff recalls, “and the subject of the email that I wrote back to him was, ‘Holy F*cking Shit.’ That was the subject.”

• Connor Storrie does Shakespeare, But Bad.

• Bowls with the Bard is holding auditions for Stoned King Lear. (Related: Pot Girls)

• Gavin Newsom’s wine business is called PlumpJack and he’s expanding the metaphor.3

• Hamlet: The Musical Comedy New Yorker cartoon. (obligatory Funny Boy link. Speaking of “what Booth did to Lincoln”:)

• A relative of the guy who shot the guy who shot Lincoln made his London debut in an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale called “Perdita, or the Royal Milkmaid.”

• Baz Luhrmann designed a private Pullman car. (£15,000 nets you a personal chef, butler and steward)

  The immersive design centres on a fictional character imagined by Luhrmann: Celia is conceived as a leading lady who, after a triumphant performance as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is gifted her own Pullman carriage.

• The first use of “cool” as “impudent” is from an 18th c. adaptation of Henry V.

  The earliest OED citation for this sense is from the English writer Aaron Hill’s tragedy King Henry V (1723), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s 1599 play that adds a romance between the king’s mistress and the French dauphin.4

• A sample of Shakespeare items currently available on Ebay: a letter from Houdini about his William Henry Ireland collection,5 a very strange sideboard, a Picasso sketch, a bust of Shakespeare as a springer spaniel, a bust of Shakespeare from my nightmares,6 and a Fourth Folio.

• Speaking of nightmares, this sentient cake poster for Much Ado at Alabama Shakes.

• Watching Noah Jupe marvel at having six weeks of rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet is delightful and also slightly painful.7 (Points for keeping Peter)

• Patrick Page on the Grinch.

  You know, the Grinch is like Richard III, the person who stands on the outside, on top of the mountain, looking down at the Whos below, and saying, ‘I’m going to get back at them.’ That has a lot of Richard III energy.

• STC’s mock trial is a constant delight.

  In her brief, Dunn declared that Emilia’s theft of the handkerchief was a “substantial factor” in Desdemona’s death…

• The Birthplace Trust appointed its first Creative Director.

• Hey look, more Kyd.8

  It attributes Henry VI Part 1 to Kyd, Thomas Nashe and Shakespeare, but not to Marlowe as was previously assumed.

• Exactly how many fairies are there and what is Moth/Mote’s deal?9

  Whether Moth is named or not does not have any consequence for the plot of the play, and yet this textual crux is one that continues to intrigue me….Does Bottom simply not address Moth because, as their name seems to imply, he does not see them?

• Rock climbing Shakespeare graffiti.

• Trying to write a play per month is a Bad Idea via .

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Recommendations

• This is also a Bad Idea.

• Ray Bradbury for prunes.

• Sondheim’s birthday cake.

• “If no letter from you comes soon, I will die” -Zizizi, 19th c. BCE.

• Apollinaire’s German shell ring and a deeply impractical sword.

• A member of Richard III’s parliament smuggles a coffin of Portugal farts.

• William Shawn “once had a writer sit outside his office till 2:30 a.m. in a standoff over a hyphen.”

• “I don’t want to imply that one of the 20th century’s greatest explorers was killed by an overly vigorous workout on the pogo stick, but…” via

4

Please read this play. It is insane and must be performed immediately. (Or at least read at stands on a Monday.) Henry’s ex-lover Harriet whom he seduced and abandoned follows him to France, sneaks into his tent disguised as a boy, tells him he’s an a$$hole, gives him letters exposing Scroop et. al., and stabs herself.

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• Stand back all ye Game of Thrones-Shakespeare parallels, an “immersive” play about the mad king arrives at the Royal Shakespeare Company this summer.2

  "Shakespeare is the greatest name in English literature, and his plays have been a constant source of inspiration to me and my writing. Not only that, he faced similar challenges in how to put a battle on stage, so we are in good company."

• Shut up and take my money.

• The Met is getting a new Macbeth in the fall with an insane cast. (Lise Davidsen, Quinn Kelsey, Ryan Speedo Green…)

• “Sword Strikes Playgoer During ‘Richard III’ in Berlin.”

  This is not the first case of injury onstage for Eidinger…In 2016, the actor told the newspaper Die Zeit that he had once injured himself during a performance of “Hamlet” at the Barbican Center in London, when he slipped, hit his head on a concrete balcony and lost consciousness…The audience, according to Eidinger, thought it was all part of the play.

• Tempest at a youth hostel at Berkeley Shakespeare.

  Ticketholders could avail themselves of the chance to stay at the hostel overnight, in community with cast and crew, rather than drive home alone in the dark. Accordingly, activities such as a 10:00 p.m. movie, guided group stretching, and nature hikes were planned…

• Poems on the Underground was inspired by an ex-pat New Yorker + As You Like It.

  One evening about 40 years ago, Judith Chernaik was taking part in a reading of “As You Like It” when she had a flash of inspiration…Why not put poems in the Underground, London’s busy subway system?

• Lavina Jadhwani’s ADO is up at Indy Shakes directed by Dawn Monique Williams.

• Romero + Juliet “fuses the filmmaking world of George Romero, famous for Night of the Living Dead, with William Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy.”

• An immersive Tempest in Brooklyn with “Butoh-inspired movement” and Shostakovich.

• O’Romeo, based on “Mafia Queens of Mumbai”

• The Bardy Bunch mashes up “more than a dozen Shakespearean tragedies with the sunny pop anthems of two iconic '70s television families.”

• Who is your favorite audience member? (Dan Radcliffe)

  My other favorite audience member…I was doing a play in the UK called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead…he came in to the first act, had a foot long sandwich…ate the entire sandwich…and then went to sleep – and he’s front row by the way…some people are are weird.

• Henry VI’s “Parliament of bats”3

• Suffolk’s wife was Chaucer’s granddaughter and Suffolk (probably) spent two years writing her love poetry from French jail.4

• Hot Hamnet Hamlet’s Romeo will be set in a “‘version of now' Verona” and inspired by Sliding Doors (1998).

• “Macbeth is the worst.” -Guy Who Fixes the Swords (with Henry IV Part I close behind – ecce signum)

• What is the best piece of advice you have ever received? (Damian Lewis)

  Don’t read your reviews. I was told this by a guy called Tim Pigott-Smith, who was a wonderful actor, and he was directing me in Hamlet. I was playing Hamlet – this was early, I was about 24. He said, “Just know yourself the strengths and the weaknesses of the production and of your performance, and don’t read any reviews.” Excellent advice.

• The Glasgow Shakespeare Society is (potentially) the world’s second oldest.

• The smells of The Tempest.

• Backstage at Coriolanus with Aufidius (+bonus Sting in him)

• Romeo and Juliet at University of Nevada, Reno on the cover of “American Theatre”

• “Watching Ben Carlson and Tom Rooney do the tent scene in the second act – for me that was worth the price of admission.”

• The Globe hired its first Chief Impact Officer.

• Hamnet roundup: merch – blanket, book, and candle + tourism bump + no, Ian McKellen didn’t “brutally diss” it (“if this were played”, etc.)

• A gentle reminder from APT that climate change is a thing. (still)

• Southern Shakes has Tempest-themed coffee specials including “Miranda’s Meadow Matcha.”

• Bob Jones University cut Macbeth lines “related to the devil, witchcraft, and other sins.” (But…how? That’s…most of the play)

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Recommendations

• I love the tea ladies.5

• Bat bombs and rocket cats.6 via + “pigeons transmogrified”

• Investigative journalism via rock opera location scouting via 7

• Guillermo del Toro nerding out on NYPL Frankenstein material is a delight.8

• “I can No More Cease to Love you than I can Cease to Love my Self” (1772)

• “Gaucher wore glasses for the duel. Renaud poked them as a flex.” via @sahelanth

• Marat’s bloodstained L’Ami du Peuple is in the French National Library. via

• The podcast Prop Talk is incredible. Please enjoy this story about Ben Affleck tossing turkeys into a lake. (I think this is the movie in question.)

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• Weird, A new pop musical Macbeth.

• Auditioning for Macbeth retold as an episode of Friends is a thing you can do.2 (archive)

• An all-drag Macbeth set in 1980s London.

• Macbeth in Minneapolis roundup: No Porter = Seyton gets the funny + more.

  We did a talkback the other day, and a lot of audience members were very emotional, especially with everything that's going on in our community with ICE and people being kidnapped and deported, and this play definitely explores all of that and the effects that one or a couple of individuals' actions can have on an entire country.

• Related: the MAC Lip Bar for Macbeth where you can get a “complimentary lipstick application by MAC artists inspired by the fearless style of Lady Macbeth” is genius.

• Macbeth as “couples therapy.” (oh. oh no.)

  It’s been a funny household here. We’ll be cooking dinner, chopping vegetables, and saying, “Screw your courage to the sticking place!”

• Look, as long as Nora Polley keeps talking, I’m going to keep sharing. Previous + new thoughts on Plummer’s Lear, grumpy Malcolms, understudies, show stops + student matinees, drunk actors, and Lear announcing the Russia-Canada hockey score during the storm scene (1972).

• Kenneth Branagh, Alfred Enoch, Alex Hassell and Tamara Harvey talk Henry V.

  So welcome the ghosts. Welcome the ghosts. I mean, you could almost weep when you think of the people who’ve walked on that stage.

• Emma Smith makes a persuasive argument for Twelfth Night.3

  …the hope embedded in the comedies and the so-called romances is that what is lost or wrecked can be recovered or remade…That prefix “re” is really in some ways the kind of syntax of comedy…perhaps our cultural preference to spectate disaster, the aesthetic of tragedy, should be replaced, at least for a short time, by a preference for recovery, the narrative art of comedy.

  …what I want to suggest about Twelfth Night is that it is its unsettledness and its acceptance of imperfection and compromise as a feature of individual humans and the societies they create is its predominant claim on our modern attention.

• To repair the Durham First Folio or…

• “In the script, Jerry writes they intended this piece to be a rewrite of Richard II minus the plot and that character.”

• Riz Ahmed on why Hamlet via @edelsemple

• Sports reporting for the Washington Post.

  At the end of every Olympics, our editor Tracee Hamilton would crack open a Guinness and recite the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, about “we happy few.” We laughed so hard that the New York Times staffers sitting in their office beyond a plywood wall would shush us—for which we would toss pencils at them.

• A Shakespeare festival in Traverse City includes a scene from a recent production of “Bromeo and the Juliettes.”

• A 90-minute Caesar with "no togas.”4 (more)

• “Nothing says “romance” like Richard III tickets!”

• An evening of music including original compositions from the Globe and RSC + songs from *two* Henry VIIIs (two more than I’ve seen) + Mrs. Patmore via @itseleanorgrant.

• George Saunders on Ezra Klein:

  In the best of Shakespeare, what you feel is a god’s eye view of someone going: Whoa, this is amazing — without tilting the board based on your own viewpoint. The vastness that you feel in him.

• Colin Gorrie on “wyrd”/”weird” via

  …people sort of – I wouldn’t say misinterpret – but they reinterpret what “weird sisters” means, because really what “weird sisters” meant at the time was the “sisters of fate”, “the sisters who control destiny.” But they were a bit weird as well.

• Hamnet’s Hamlet would like you to know that he is all grown up.

• Public Works at the Public Theater via Tessitura. (video)

• Jonathan Bate on hamartia. via

  …the passage has repeatedly been taken as a moment of self-diagnosis, a tacit acknowledgement of Hamlet’s own fatal flaw. Yet this reading rests on surprisingly fragile foundations. The “vicious mole” passage appears in the Second Quarto but was cut from the Folio text, the version of the play most closely associated with theatrical performance. Its absence suggests that Shakespeare, or the acting company, did not regard it as structurally or thematically indispensable.

• Cameos at Southern Shakespeare Company. (more)

  Sometimes, the cameo is tailored specifically to the individual. During "Antony & Cleopatra," the role was personalized for each night’s guest. When Philo addressed Dr. Jai Vartikar, First Lady of Florida State University, as “FSUvius,” the student-heavy audience erupted with cheers — a moment that could only have happened in Tallahassee.

• A “Romeo & Juliet Suite” with lots of steadicam.

• The Heathcliff-to-Hamlet pipeline.

• An actor’s ghost.

  A luminous, pearly vapor having the form of a man emerged from the southwest room on the lower floor…it wore a stiff straw hat set jauntily, a light suit and carried a cane. It floated down the long corridor…and wailed in a voice itself the ghost of the vocal: "To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day," and so on to the end.

• Casting Hannibal.

  Edward Saxon had put together a casting memo in May 1989, naming 75 potential candidates for the character. The list was a wide-ranging, spitballing assortment of late-1980s male performers, including David Bowie, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Charles Grodin, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino, Bill Murray, and Warren Beatty. Demme was also apparently interested in an English stage actor named Edward Petherbridge, who’d starred in the original London production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead…

• A deep-dive on the Mellon Foundation.

  Under Alexander’s leadership…Mellon has disbursed enormous sums of money to hyper-liberal academic initiatives at institutions both public and private. These have included grants…to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva…

  …Even before its recent pivot, Mellon tended to tilt to the left…But although some of its endeavors through the years were expressly social-justice-oriented (such as a 2016 grant for Columbia’s “Facing Whiteness” project, an interdisciplinary study of how white Americans think about their racial identity), others were more traditional (a long-standing relationship with the Folger Shakespeare Library, for example).

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Recommendations

• Baby bat bubble baths.

• Bhutan’s talking stamps.

• The best Fiddler poster you will ever see.

• Drinking with instruments + vaccine beer.

• Buy a James Ijames pass, get a yellow beanie.

• George Washington Carver had a passion for crochet.

• “Also makes me want to be an actor…” -George Saunders.

• Heather Cox Richardson on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. via

4

But yes towels.

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A double dose of Shakespeare News for your long weekend – one today and one tomorrow.

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• The Shakespeare stencil in King’s Lynn is not a Banksy. (and no longer exists)

• Ian McKellen does Thomas More on Colbert + John Oliver’s middle name is “William” because he was born on The Birthday.

• Macbeth in the King’s College Chapel.2 (more, photos by Paul Ashley)

  …this is a sacred space and you’ve just, you know, murdered someone on stage…

• More Shakespeare-in-sacred-spaces.

• Your annual reminder that you can buy props from Shakespeare’s Globe including a bike “ridden by Alfred Enoch in the performance [of Romeo and Juliet] and comes complete with stage blood on the tires from the performance.”3

• Shakespeare in China sidebar:

  • Xi Jinping on Shakespeare.

    “[Xi] spoke about the cultural revolution and how he wanted to read broadly, so he broke the rules and had to walk 10 miles to get the books he wanted,” said Peter Kyle, the business secretary, who was sitting across the table from him. “One of them was the complete works of Shakespeare.”

  • A (white) Othello in a Shanghai shopping mall.

    It briefly had problems when it printed fliers for “Othello” that showed a Chinese Desdemona, Othello’s wife, leaning on the shoulder of her foreign husband. This prompted angry warnings from a Shanghai culture impresario that spotlighting romance between a foreign man and Chinese woman was offensive.

• Gotta love Oliver as “a corporate schemer with slightly Draco Malfoy energy.” (archive / it is his year)

• Violet Bridgerton’s masquerade costume is Titania.

• Shakespeare in the Bardo. (yes, more Hamnet.)

• More “real history” behind Hamnet.

  “So this is the room where William Shakespeare was born?”

  “By tradition, this is what we say…”

• More Maggie O’Farrell.

  I did quite a bit of mudlarking right below where the original Globe Theatre was. On certain tides, you can find Tudor brass pins that were used in the theatre to pin costumes and hair…I kept them because it’s so exciting that they were very likely from the Globe Theatre costumes. I gave some of them to Paul [Mescal] when we started shooting and told him that I wanted him to have it because, while we can’t know for sure, they may well have been worn by Shakespeare himself.

• More Hamnet sets.

  The floor was known for having lots of broken nuts and apple cores, rubbish that the audience just threw on the ground. I remember eating apples and throwing them down for texture. Now I look back and think, “Why did we go to the trouble?” because that floor was always going to be covered by hundreds of people.

• Dana Stevens on Hamnet:

  “‘Maybe I’ll commit suicide, maybe I’ll write the greatest line in English literature, who can say?’ And, like, it… [profound sigh]”

• “In Our Time” on Henry IV.

• Shakespeare’s em-dash-enabled aposiopesis.

• Mark Strong started his career playing the “juvenile leads” Ferdinand and Romeo. (archive)

• The founder of All Queer Shakespeare in Arizona.

• Stella Adler on “a guy like Hamlet.”

• Let’s Talk About..."Julius Caesar" with Dr. Will Tosh via SF Shakes.

• A queer Hal.

  “When the director called me to talk about the role, I really loved the queer angle that he was going for with Prince Hal and Poins.”

• A Play On advertorial on collaboration.

• A new Margaret play in Spanish.

• Sheep shearing and bucket tossing.

• Professor Arlene Okerlund on banjos and Shakespeare.

• “All Is But Fantasy” music. (more)

• “Creative practitioners” can join the British Shakespeare Association for free. (do it!)

• The Compagnia de’ Colombari Lear was lovely. An excellent reminder that the Fool doesn’t need solving. He can simply be an incredible weirdo.

• Jonathan Pryce gave his drama school Hamlet to Paul Mescal. (via Ben Broadribb)

• “Hamlet is not about resistance.”

• 2025 OSF season in review.

• A picnic-themed season announcement from Shakespeare Dallas.

• “She Doesn’t See Richard III as a Villain.”

• When “archery” and “remedy” rhymed with “eye.”

• Ouch.

  “I would have liked to have played Hamlet.”

  “That train has left the station.”

  “Oliver played him when he was 42.”

  “Olivier was a better actor than you.”

• A truly terrible Richard III poem via .

  by murtherynge the innocentes, that he him selfe myght raygne
  Yet lyke a noughty false traytour, at Boseworth was he slayne

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Recommendations

• Goethe’s ant.

• “Erato amat.”

• 19th c. cat dropping (for science!)

• Two years playing with a cardboard model sounds divine.

• Is Henry James’ typist responsible for him being that way.

• The Yale prof in “One Battle After Another”& “Marty Supreme.”

• “To make any worthwhile comments about someone’s work, you have to have at least some sympathy with it…But I remained on the outside of your plays.”

• Space travel selection criteria via James Pitt.

  

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• Hey, look at these brilliant humans reading Timon. (photos by ARIN SANG-URAI/photojuice)

• Good Tickle Brain on Mountainish Inhumanity.

• Stratford stage manager Nora Polley has alll the tea. (+ her book looks like a hoot)

  • “Have you ever seen tension between costumes and props?” / “Oh gosh yes.”

    “Goldie Semple was playing Emilia in Othello and she went for a costume fitting…and they said to her ‘please don’t sit down in this’ and she said, ‘Sit down in it? I’m going to DIE in it.’”

  • On directors + a brilliant way to motivate a Hamlet scene change:

    “…most directors, if you think you have a good idea, you have to try to manipulate it so that THEY think of it.”

  • On Adrian Noble directing Ben Carlson in Hamlet:

    “…I think in the total rehearsal time that we had, I would think that we only spent about maybe 45 minutes on the soliloquies.” 😱

  • Champagne problems:

    “[Julius Caesar] was directed by James McDonald from The Citadel who had just done Julius Caesar with I think 18 actors so he really didn’t know what to do when Stratford will give you 35.”2

• Amie Bjorklund is the new AD of Flagstaff Shakes.

• Orlando Shakes’ Nurse (Suzanne O’Donnell) & Friar (Jim Helsinger) are married.

• Actors from the London Stage work out how tf to do the last scene of As You with five actors.

• “The fastest time to watch live productions of every play by William Shakespeare was completed by Dan Wilson in 328 days.” (source) (this feels breakable, no?)

• Is Paul Mescal’s tiny Hamnet earring setting a trend?

• A truly horrific Ophelia experience. (more / don’t do this)

• Shakespeare by the Sea (the California one3) needs to raise $200,000 and the King’s Lynn’s Guildhall needs £30.5m.

• Still no foils, but +1 for masks and rapiers are cool too. (background)

• Edmund doesn’t like being reviewed.

  During one of Edmund’s audience-traversing speeches, Martinez tried to grab the notebook out of my hand, a unique puncturing of theater critics’ imagined invisibility…

• Ian McKellen’s “most complex” role was Leontes.

• Wanamaker Tempest sets.4 (“Caliban likes his football”)

• Studying Shakespeare at Syracuse in 1908.

• An Australian Taming with wine flights, puppet Macbeth in Chicago, and a Canadian Midsummer ballet set during the royal tour. (Bottom gets a moose head and lots of plaid)

• When animating Shakespeare, humans are still important for “narrative and visual coherence.” So we’ve got that going for us.

• You’ll be able to see n + 1 Midsummer’s in London this summer. (Globe, Open Air)

• The RSC’s first female-directed Henry V has a full cast.

• Your annual reminder that Shakespeare has Aussie descendants + other scandalous facts. (Features ale-tasting and syphilis)

• The West End Romeo and Juliet has a production drama therapist. (as did Othello)

• The outgoing Stratford AD as Laertes and Benedict Bridgerton getting his funeral oration on. (Also, if Alfie looks familiar, it’s because he’s Puck in the Bridge Midsummer.)

• The history behind Grace Pervades.

• The Riz Ahmed “Hamlet” mashes up Ophelia and Horatio.5

• The & Juliet special sauce.

  Not everything worked with Shakespearean times; Bops with too many contemporary references, like Perry’s “California Gurls,” were out of the mix.

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Recommendations

• A taup.

• Moon type.

• Drinking Brecht.

• Shoveling unicyclists. (archive)

• The Nihilist Penguin via .

• “You think I’m a great editor,” he would say, “because I never edited you.”

• “Musicals are intrusions on the detachment of spectatorship.” via

• Essays on small arts organizations:

  “Vision, capacity, and capital” via

  “Such groups are self-sufficient (in the short term) because they are willing to work long hours for little pay and few resources to take big creative risks.”

  “What Leaders of Small Arts Organizations Are Asked to Bear” via

  “You are not simply an executive director or managing director. You are often the chief fundraiser, head of programming, community liaison, institutional historian, human resources department, and moral center of the organization.”

  + “People, Not Stuff” via Adam Greenfield &

4

I’m still working out Antonia-as-pelligrino-bottle-in-heel.

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Direct replies to this email have been going into spam. I think I’ve remedied the issue going forward but am still rescuing lost emails from Gmail’s eldritch clutches. If you’ve written in the last month, I should be able to retrieve it and respond, if older than a month, please re-send.

Timon Tonight

Come hear an absurdly talented group of actors hurl “My wounds ache at you” and “I’d thrash you, but I’d infect my hands” at each other. Pay-what-you-can tickets available 30 mins pre-curtain.

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• Karen Ann Daniels, the artistic director of the Folger is in the hospital, send her good thoughts.

• “People tend to frown when Luke Thompson compares “Bridgerton” to Shakespeare.” (archive)

• After direct appeals and much teasing the world has finally been graced with the Hamnet Rihanna dance party.

• Joe Alwyn played Banquo in a Macbeth on rollerskates.

• Henry V as a global barometer.

  We are living in a world of chaos, instability and fractured alliances. Burgundy’s climactic speech about the devastating impact of war – where even the survivors “grow like savages – as soldiers will / That nothing do but meditate on blood” – has acquired new potency.

• Kindly cut this $#&% out. (again)

• OSF increased their ticket sales by 42% in one year.

• Inspired by Station Eleven, FlagShakes is adding a pay-what-you-wish option.

• The Actors from the London Stage are getting ready to go on the road.

  We’ve found games within the scenes, things to focus our objectives and remind us of what the characters are trying to affect in each other; a game of tag between Phebe, Silvius, ‘Ganymede’, and Orlando was a particular standout, but one-on-one pick-up basketball to work our way through Rosalind and Orlando’s power-flirting definitely gets an honourable mention.

• Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu on Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure. via

  In Shakespeare, poetry has a dramatic function. Chadwick saw that the lyricism of hip-hop and the culture of hip-hop was powerfully dramatic and theatrical, too, and could be put on stage.

• Bedlam’s four-person Othello starts in April. (more)

• Santa Cruz Shakes is doing a virtual bookclub on Much Ado and Macbeth.

• Hudson Valley Shakes is getting a new website to match their new theater.

• Do I want to know more about this 8-person, 75-minute Hamlet where two of the actors are credited as “Fencer”? Very yes.

• Quintessence contributes Rare Accidents: The Escapades of Prince Hal & Falstaff to the “What the %#$@ do we call this Henry mashup” conversation.

• A funky French Tempest with a backflipping harpy and half-masks. via Gemma Allred.

• A new film about an English girls’ boarding school, Midsummer, and falling in love with the geography teacher.

• “Lowest of the Low Celebrate 35 Years of ‘Shakespeare My Butt...’”2

• The afterlife of a 19th c. Shakespearean actor’s New Jersey mansion.3

• A free June Zoom event on Shakespeare and Race.

• A 19th c. female scholar’s thoughts on the morality of Shakespeare plus bonus title page snark (archive)

  The owner has also added a short quip or summary to the play titles, under Lear writing "Mind your daughters" and [under] Richard the III has written "There was a Damn'd villain Called 'Richard the Third' in the present times has a great many fellows."

• Macbeth: The Ballet in New Zealand.

• More Shakespeare Saved My Life

  …being Black and having the skill to do Shakespeare has made me an insider of sorts. But Shakespeare can’t carry the day. It’s opened so many doors in my life, but it’s also a gilded cage. I can’t tell you how many times people have heard me perform Shakespeare and come up and said, ‘You should play ‘Othello’

• More All Is But Fantasy

  To me, Lady Macbeth sounded like Tina Turner. She was saying, ‘I want more but the world won’t give me more.’”

• More All the Devils Are Here

  Shakespeare does not use language decoratively. That’s a huge misunderstanding about Shakespeare. So if he uses an image, it’s because the image specifies what he’s talking about, not decorates it. When Juliet reaches for… ‘my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.’ She’s expressed something about the nature of love in her language. True love that’s sublime and true, not decorative. She didn’t say it that way in order to be beautiful. It is beautiful because it is true.

• More Hamnet thoughts from A.N. Wilson

  I could just about believe that Mrs Shakespeare in real life was a sex goddess, like the actress in this film: but I can not believe that William Shakespeare had a really stupid face, as is, unfortunately, the case with Paul Mescal.

• And Kate Maltby

  Elsewhere, Hamnet is taught Greek; his twin sister Judith is taught his mother’s lore of the forest. When they swap clothes in an attempt to trick their parents, it is this difference in knowledge that gives them away (and the difference is presented as somehow revealing an innate and sexed truth, rather than a learned inequality).

• More Leeds Playhouse Midsummer (+ “Robin Goodfellow, erm, Robin Starveling, the Sommelier.”)

  “So, the court world of Athens in our production is quite pronounceably patriarchal and physical violence is very present. We were thinking a little bit about the rise of neo-fascism across Europe today and how the mortal world in the play is in conversation with fascistic rule.”

  According to Ben Broadribb who actually saw the thing:

  “Puck opened the show by sitting on a table for about 2 minutes, eating a banana and saying nothing. The mechanicals did lines of coke during their first rehearsal. And at the end of Pyramus and Thisbe, Theseus shot Bottom and Quince dead.”

• Spanish-inflected Shakespeare in Dallas. (more El Rey de Pollo)

• Romeo and Juliet (A Comedy), the Lope de Vega version.

• Juliet: A Revenge Comedy.

• Book titles inspired by Shakespeare. (quiz, paywall)

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Recommendations

• The oldest cat name? “Ta-miu” via

• Lord Byron continues to be a ghosting f*ckboy.

• The best use of drone footage I’ve seen in a while.

• Wynkyn de Worde buys “one hoggeshede bookes.”

• The Best Parts of Period Dramas Are the Sheep. (archive)

• “People pay a lot to learn how to sound like you.” (archive)

• Early 20th c. attention tests + gradual asphyxiation machines.

• “I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never handcuffed an emu before…”

• “the once-great engineer…believing himself to be in a romantic relationship with a telepathic bird.”

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Bonus News

Some extra Shakespeare for a snowy day. Celebrate by reciting “penalty of Adam.” News news cometh in the morning, Timon in the evening.

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• A ‘sonic story’ for Hamlet.

• The Guthrie has very cool resources for educators.2

• Mac MacDaniel has a new Shakespeare podcast.

• Charlene V. Smith has a new series on Margaret adaptations.

• An after-hours candlelit museum tour featuring rosewater cocktails and 19th c. daggers? AND Shakespeare? Sold.

• Judi Dench sidebar

  • “The Twelfth Night Reunion” is magical, watch the whole thing.

  • Did her eight-times great-grandfather meet Shakespeare? (Maybe) (original)

  • On Branagh. (more)

• The Marys in London are using the same Yale Shakespeare copies of The Tempest as the NYC folks. Some lucky New Yorker had the opportunity to buy a copy licked by Cheyanne Jackson.

• A copy of the Dalí As You Like It on sale.

• Today in the macabre: Charlotte Clopton takes a bite out of her shoulder. via Edel Semple

• Your annual reminder that there are bits of Lear in “I Am the Walrus.”

• “My PhD from Cambridge exploring the history of magic in Shakespearean drama got me the offer.” via

• Another Shakespeare and Star Wars book is coming

• More witchy Hamnet work. (archive)

  …when Hamnet died — on that day, Jessie Buckley and I did not talk about the scene. In the morning, she would do fever writing about her dreams and then would pick some music, and as soon as I got to set, I would put the music on repeat so the whole set was harmonized to the vibration she wanted.

• Grab your free tickets for Emma Smith’s Notre Dame Shakespeare lecture (Feb 10), and Will Tosh on Caesar for San Francisco Shakes (Feb 2).

• STC’s 37th annual mock trial will be about “the pivotal role of the handkerchief and Emilia's hand in procuring the item.”

• For those who like their revenges brought in all at once: Hamlet and The Eumenides all in one evening. (godspeed)

• Oregon Shakespeare costumes get around.

  One particularly notable rental was a gown from OSF’s production of Pride and Prejudice that was worn on SNL by Al Pacino.

• Life after Melvyn Bragg (this guy)

• A Macbeth set during the civil wars of 19th-century Yorubaland.

• “Alveston has the famous ‘kissing tree’ in its gardens where allegedly Shakespeare had his first kiss…”

• UK Celebrity Traitors murder while they smile and Alan Cumming is non-stop over on the other side of the pond.

• “You became president of the Cambridge Footlights. How did that come about?” via

  I auditioned for a lot of shows and knew I was a good actor, and was like: ‘Why are these 18-year-old directors telling me I’m rubbish and can’t do Shakespeare?’ So I was like: ‘Fuck it, I’ll just tell my own stories.’

• A Venus & Adonis mural, “one of only two contemporary illustrations of a Shakespearean work.” (t’other. I think.)

• Gerran Howell (Dennis on “The Pitt”) got his start playing Puck.

• “Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?” by Richard W Halperin.

• Embedding oracy in UK curricula.

• Five Shakespeare re-tellings.

• Benjamin Millepied choreographs an R&J at the Armory.

• Puppet Tiger Tybalt continues to delight.

• Elon Musk’s dream dinner party guests are William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, and Benjamin Franklin.

• Does Shakespeare sound better in a Southern accent and What did Richard III sound like?

• Lee Pace took a deep dive into Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare.

• Maggie Smith’s Lady M costume is looking for a home.

• The evolution of “progress” goes through King John.

• lust! Shrew Tart uffe

• The Old Globe at 90.

• A “diffuse but visually arresting” (and silent) Anthony and Cleopatra.

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Recommendations

• A carnyx.

• Dowsing for bodies.

• A 15th-century keyboard cat.

• “I hope you choke!” Literally.

• The most beautiful home libraries.

• “Utterance chunking” and WhatsApp

• We’re catching whales’ breath in drones now.

• The gastro-​Egyptologist who also invented the Xbox.

• On the wire above the ruins: funambulism in postwar Germany.

2

Their Associate Director of Education and Engagement, Lezlie Cross, is a deeply awesome human and fellow William Winter stan. (Who?) This is your annual reminder that you can read many of Augustin Daly’s cuts online, many with notes by Winter and some with vintage costume lists. (My favorite is Touchstone’s “curiously formed cap.”)

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• Romeo and Juliet and Godzilla.

• The brilliant folks at St. Johns hosted the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference last week. Adventures were had.

• Obituaries for Tina Packer (more) and Carmen de Lavallade (as Titania).

• Shakespeare in American Communities grant intentions are due at the end of the month and ASC is looking for a Director of Education & Community Engagement.

• Patrick Page is playing Titus, Michael Potts and [many others] are playing Lear (more2), Whitney White’s All Is But Fantasy starts at the RSC (more), the Riz Ahmed Hamlet has a trailer (more), take the PATH to Richard III, Ivo Van Hove is doing Hamlet, and you can catch a screening of Thomas Ostermeier’s French Twelfth Night in NYC.

• All the Hamlets.

• Hamnet roundup:

  • Read the screenplay, check out the costumes and sets, and book a stay in the stand-in for Anne Hathaway’s cottage. (£1547 for 3 nights)

  • The “real history” (or is it? and do we care?) from the Smithsonian and BBC.

  • The film is a “gut punch,” but is it also “grief porn,” “manipulative,” or “something worse” / “missing the point”? (And what about Ur-Hamlet?)

  • “This is a strange segue, but I heard Chloe Zhao – Oscar-winning director – had you actually get drunk for one of your scenes.”3 (more)

  • “Paul Mescal Recalls ‘Having to Embody a Penis’ During a Tantric ‘Hamnet’ Rehearsal”

  • The leads want to play the Macbeths.

  • Every Generation Gets the Shakespeare It Deserves.

  • “[‘To Be’] didn’t come from the intellectual mind…“It came from the tension in the body.” vs. “That’s balls.”

  • I fundamentally disagree with this ranking. (Fiennes 4eva)

• Deborah Warner is a Shakespearean powerhouse and the new AD at the Armory.

• “A Sydney production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been postponed and tickets refunded because actors were reluctant to stage the play featuring antisemitic themes, one month after the Bondi terror attack.”

• Carrie Coon on APT: “I was in in Wisconsin…” “WOO” “Doing Shakespeare…”

• Adjoa Andoh MBE is the inaugural resident in the Folger’s Director’s Residency.

• The [$2,970] Romeo and Juliet-themed pen is mightier than…

• A sci-fi Tempest in Chicago. (more)

• A four-actor 90-minute Caesar in Philly.

• Salieri’s Falstaff. (yes, please cut Fenton) + All the Verdi.

• Jacob Ming-Trent on his play Shakespeare Saved My Life.

• Josh Brolin did Caesar speeches on the “Wake Up Dead Man” set.

• Former Alabama Shakespeare Managing Director Alan Harrison on cuts:

  “See what the company looks like with a $6 million budget.” These were some of the final words spoken to me by a board member at the then-$12 million Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

• Pepys sees Twelfth Night, thinks it is “a silly play.” (1662/63)

• It is, however, the most-quoted Shakespeare play in Sherlock Holmes.

• “Lakota-centered adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ in development.”

• Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet are among the top-10 most-assigned high school books in the last 60 years.

• A new play about what the %#$& the Porter is doing after Act II.

• F. Murray Abraham keeps a mildly distressing Shylock portrait in his home.4

• The Public is in its third round of layoffs.

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Recommendations

• Caligula and hellebore.

• Twelfth Night in Austenland.

• Happy 2026 Public Domain Day.

• Hedda Gabler with bonus Streisand.

• Roger Mortimer’s Christmas dancing doublet.

• What Hallie Flanagan learned from The Abbey.

• Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green.

• Someone stick the Skarsgårds into Long Day’s Journey immediately, please.

4

(Martha Plimpton keeps a more pleasant Helena engraving in her house.)

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December Shakespeare News

As promised, December’s roundup is below and new news tomorrow. If you are near NYC, come to a reading of Timon of Athens I’m directing for The Acting Company.

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Quick Links

• Hamlet at the National.2

• Andrew Scott to play Ian Charleson in new film “Elsinore.”3 (more)

  Elsinore centres on the period during which Charleson was preparing to play Hamlet at the National Theatre. Famously, Charleson, though seriously ill from AIDS, was brought in to the production after Daniel Day-Lewis abandoned the production, and garnered rave reviews. He died less than two months later…

• “He thought he was adapting The Tempest. Then the memory of a demonic mushroom trip intruded” via

  Of all the plays I’ve written, I’ll Be the Devil is one of my favourites. Inspired by The Tempest, it’s a violent exploration of English occupation in Ireland during the eighteenth century – a sort of psychotic lovechild of Barry Lyndon and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• “What panto taught me about how to stage Shakespeare” Or, “I realized I’m the kind of director who sees a pre-existing text and wants to kick the sh*t out of it” also via

• There’s a new musical Henry V + Crispin Crispianus in “Percy Jackson”

  This party boi trashbag is about to break history…witness the glow up as Sweet Henry V (it’s pronounced Vee, actually) transforms from playboy prince to the most famous warrior king in British history. All he has to do is defeat the douchebag Prince of Wales, Owain Glyndŵr…We’re talking Hamilton meets Braveheart meets Priscilla Queen of Desert…

• Paul Rudd lied about playing Hamlet directed by Ben Kingsley.

• After 46 years, it is time to get a new Bottom head. (“It’s kind of sad and scary in there.”) The bear, however, can stay.

• Garry Hynes is directing Macbeth with Marie Mullen4 as Lady M and Marty Rea as Macbeth. I don’t think I’ve never seen either a 70+ Lady or one significantly older than the Lord. Should be a sight to see.

• “I do think there’s a clear difference between a production of As You Like It where the entire cast includes Queer and Trans actors to highlight the ridiculousness of gender roles and heteronormative relationships within the context of a play that is already doing so versus a production of Hamlet set on the Titanic, because the director thought it would be cool.5” via .

• The RSC cut their in-house musicians and plans to cut total staff by 11%.

• Shakespeare at Yale is going strong.

• William Henry West Betty, the 19th c. child Hamlet.

• Kevin Kline Does Shakespeare: The Book.

• The Edward IV roll is now online, supported by the American Branch of the Richard III society.6

• “Hamlet & Juliet is a wry, gothic, Shakespeare-inspired romantasy in which the brooding Prince Hamlet and the inexplicably resurrected Juliet must thwart a dark conspiracy threatening the Globe.”

• Shakespeare and knife crime.

• There’s an Otello poster on the Masquerade walls.

• An Othello for Hallamas + “Shaxberd” as one of “the Poets who mayd the plaies.”

• If you are a fan of Edwin Booth and have a spare $350.

• The Reflecting Shakespeare program at The Old Globe.

• A Victorian Shakespeare illustrator.

• Shakespeare in South Africa.

• Did Shakespeare’s Audiences Believe in Ghosts?

• “I am as constant as the Northern star.” (Literally. Sort of.)

• “Design and Discomfort: Teaching Shakespeare and Race” is open source + free.

• Emma Smith on Henry VIII and Romeo and Juliet.

• Bee Wilson on her mother’s (Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan Jones) toast rack. (paywall, worth quoting at length)

  Toast was something that was my mother’s breakfast for decades, along with strong coffee and pears and cheese. And she always put the toast in a toast rack…The fact that my mother, who was a brilliant Shakespeare scholar, was so attached to her toast rack was a throwback to my grandmother, who was always trying to come across as more posh than she really was and hide her humble background. Her toast rack was a very important personal monument. I think it told her who she was; or who she aspired to be.

  One day, she informed me and my youngest son that a thief had stolen her valuable silver-plated toast rack and that she had reported it to the police…At the time, all of us in the family found a dark humour in the story of the toast rack thief but it was also sad because we eventually realised this was the kind of paranoia that people sometimes get when they are in the early stages of dementia.…By the time we moved her to a care home in the city where I live, she had forgotten all about the silver toast rack, just as she soon forgot the names of her daughter and grandchildren and even of Shakespeare, to whom she had devoted a lifetime of scholarship.

  In the care home, they served her white toast and marmalade and she did not seem to mind that they served it without a toast rack or without the pear she had always eaten at home. About a year before she died we went to clear her house and my sister was the one who found the toast rack at the very back of a cupboard.

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Recommendations

• Tiny furniture.

• An historic cat door.

• A Lost Crusader Sword.

• Transforming chess pieces.

• The sound of “please take your seats.”

• Dali made a jeweled heart that pumps.

• Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man.

• What happens when you hand the Emperor of Japan a bag of bluegill.

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November Shakespeare News

As promised, November’s roundup is below, look out for December tomorrow, and new news on Monday. If you are near NYC, come to a reading of Timon of Athens I’m directing for The Acting Company on Monday, January 26.

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• We’re doing AI-enhanced Midsummers now.

• Barbara Broccoli’s first post-Bond project is an Othello “adapted from” Sam Gold’s 2016 production. David Oyelowo and Rachel Brosnahan return, Cynthia Erivo joins as Emilia,2 and everyone flies to Qatar. (context)

• The RSC’s Glaswegian pub thug Macbeth. (Not Sam Heughan’s first Shakespeare)

  Several minor characters – including Old Man and two Doctors – are combined in a single Catholic priest, justified by the text’s use of the honorific “father” for seniors…

• TFANA’s digital archive is gorgeous.

• Robert Icke will direct Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe in Romeo and Juliet.

• “I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar.” (‘twas ever thus)

• A documentary about Shakespeare in an Armenian retirement home.

• Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs on Lear.

  Isaacson asks Jobs to explain how he transformed from a conventional suburban kid to a driver of change. Jobs responds by crediting his teenage encounter with William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Isaacson, naturally, is fascinated: “I asked [Jobs] why he related to King Lear… but he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop.”

• I want YOU to volunteer to design and costume an elementary school student production of “Macbeth” set in 1500’s MesoAmerica.

• A one-woman + puppets Macbeth set in WWII France. (archive)

• Leave the possets to Lady M, please.

  Staff members made medieval hot possets based on a recipe found in a book in the library. Possets are basically cream, egg, spices, and white wine…One of the fellows I only vaguely knew by sight got extremely drunk. He broke the thermostat off the wall, looked at it confusedly, and then in what I can only describe as ‘a Mr. Bean-esque fashion’ stuck it back on the wall…

• An As You Like It-themed season announcement from American Players.

• A very green (eyed?) Othello suit (more) (even more)3

  “Most of my anger was formulated in volume and aggression. I think I just screamed at her for two-and-a-half-hours.” With the wisdom of the years passed, he’s able to look at Shakespeare’s words with an appreciation for the full depth of their intention. “It isn’t just rage – it’s loss, it’s hurt, it’s self-loathing, it’s insecurity, it’s vulnerability. Anybody who’s been in a loving relationship or a marriage knows that when you do have arguments, they’re not a full-tilt 10 – they’re twos and threes and then nothing and then twos and fives and then nothing. It’s a kaleidoscope of emotion.”

• Sara Holdren on Tom Stoppard. (archive)

  Until Saturday, I would have told you that no living writer wove through the warp threads of my life with as much tensile strength, or as much influence on the pattern, as Tom Stoppard. Today, his thread runs alongside those of Chekhov and Shakespeare, Dickens and Eliot, E. M. Forster and Lloyd Alexander.

• Stoppard on “Shakespeare in Love” on Charlie Rose.

• “Theatre is a public event holding limitless private possibilities.”

• Michael Urie on Shakespeare and Oh, Mary! and the parts he still wants to play. (Bottom, Benedick, Berowne)

  “The same things that elicit a laugh in a comedy like Oh, Mary! are the things that we can [use to] elicit laughter in Shakespeare, even when it’s not funny. I’ve been in Shakespeare plays—Hamlet. There’s some funny stuff in Hamlet.”

• A new Capulet ballet with dancing suits of armor.

  In this story, Lady Capulet’s grief is romantically charged, due to an affair she’s been carrying on with Tybalt since discovering Lord Capulet in the tender embrace of Count Paris.

• Sarah Siddons “argued that acting itself was a form of theatrical criticism due to the actor’s sustained intellectual engagement with the performance text.”

• Were all those “haths” and “doths” pronounced as “has” and “does”?

• The Aaron Play “picks up right where Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus left off.”

• Buzz Goodbody’s nephew is in a two-hand “radical reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” (more via )

• A Keanu scholar on “My Own Private Idaho”

  Mr. Reeves was simultaneously playing the role in several styles, including naturalistically as well as “delivering Shakespeare with a valley-dude perspective.” “When people aren’t familiar with Brechtian’s strategic strategies in the theater they think that’s bad acting,” he concluded. “Well no. It’s a choice.”

• “Hal Prince used to say – said once – that if he saw The Acting Company on someone’s resume he would trust that they could do anything.” -Margot Harley, “the other scariest woman in the world.”

• A “dark,” “sexed-up Narnia” Midsummer at the Wanamaker. (“forgeries”)

  Robin Starveling, usually the most mocked of the Rude Mechanicals, doesn’t exist here; instead Puck takes his place, contorting on and offstage like the Emcee from Cabaret…

• “Hamlet’s frustration, impotency and inability to act are something that I relate to as a disabled person.”

• “What is it like to play a role like [Orsino], where disability isn’t the focus of the character?”

• On young Richard’s Burbage’s choice of weapon: “Was it truly a foretaste of Dada, or was the broom simply the implement closest to hand?”

• A “joyless, weird, creepy, barely comprehensible and thoroughly unpleasant” Taming that “tortures the play itself, crushing its comical spirit and reducing its already-thin characters to something less than human.” (counterpoint)

• Conan Doyle goes on a Jack the Ripper LARP with snarky Shakespeareans.

  The Shakespeare scholar on the tour, John Churton Collins, joked that even…Caliban “would have turned up his nose at this.”

• Bianca does the math.

• The Stratford Roundhouse – the RSC’s forgotten theatre.

• Utah Shakes is offering a “theatre land cruise.”

• Isaac Butler on Dark Renaissance, The Dream Factory, and Greenblatt’s “scholarship as tautology.”

• A Greenblatt origin story.

  What I most remember is that this incredibly wise teacher once said, “I don't understand a certain portion of the play”. And none of my teachers had ever said that. And the fact that there was an enigma that he couldn’t understand had a powerful effect on me for reasons I can’t explain.

• “It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done.”

• The LAMDA kids made a Hamlet mockumentary.

• Pauline Phelps 1901 play A Shakespearean Conference (1901) features a group of characters “discussing how to get more people to come see their plays.”

• “The Capulets are more pharmaceutical money.”

• A 10+ year DC Shakespeare book club.

• Green sickness in Henry IV and R&J.

• Why Kyle MacLachlan’s wine is called “Pursued by Bear.”

  Bear, to us, embodies the similarities between the time-honored crafts of acting and winemaking.

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Recommendations

• A “method” perfumer.

• An adorable crossbow.

• The origin of painting.

• MIT has a banana lounge.

• Armor that comes with a hidden writing kit.

• “I want you to slide a feather between this word and another.”

• “Mrs. Abdul Hamid has not invited Mrs. William Hohenzollern to a pink tea.”

• “How am I supposed to focus on my day job, book writing and book-chapter-for-someone-else-writing when there’s Edwardian lady wrestlers slash brothel keepers slash money forgers out there to be found?”

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Hello!

When I said I’d be back on Tuesdays…it turns out that rehearsals and newsletters go together like hot soup and roller skates: possible with practice but not on the first go. Today’s newsletter is a roundup of all the Shakespeare news from October. November’s roundup will hit your inbox on Saturday, December’s on Sunday, and there will be a shiny new News for you on Monday recapping the first half of January.

If you are near NYC, come to a reading of Timon of Athens I’m directing for The Acting Company on Monday, January 26 at 7:30 at Symphony Space. Kenneth Cavander did the adaptation, the cast is ridiculous, and it is under 90 minutes.

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• Shakespeare Behind Bars and a wedding on the Kentucky Shakespeare Twelfth Night set.

  Jerry would recount how performing the role of Caliban in “The Tempest” continues to impact his own self-understanding. In the play, Prospero says of the creature he helped create, “This thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine.” “I acknowledge that I was this person, you know – I was capable of doing that,” Jerry says of his crime. He still identifies with Caliban, and especially one of his final lines. “At the end, he comes to, at the end of his journey, I promise to ‘be wise hereafter / And seek for grace.’”

• Jonathan Church will be the next director of the Stratford Festival.

  “The festival’s strength is its ability to present work of scale and artistic quality, across all four spaces,” he said. “Very few companies are working in repertory anymore, either for artistic or financial reasons.”2

• “This ‘naughty’ black swan has been evicted from Shakespeare’s hometown.”

  Reggie, a.k.a. Mr. Terminator, was beloved by locals and tourists, but terrorized the resident swans.

• Someone reversed a car into Shakespeare’s daughter’s house. Ken Ludwig’s 2024 donation will need to be somewhat augmented.

• A man who was portrayed in a “misogynistic” and “weasel-like” way in “The Lost King” will receive compensation.

• “Amusingly named characters include Cash (Jonathan Shaboo), Purney (Bri Sudia), C-Pimp (Maya Vinice Prentiss) and Tre Bone (JAX, as Caesar’s head of security).”3

• A chilling “Who will believe thee?” (more)

  I was really struck by watching Pete Hegseth…The questioning was ultimately about the fact that he was married, and this idea of ‘you’ve taken an oath, and you’ve broken that oath, how can we trust you to take this oath?’

• Wendell Pierce is prepping Othello with one of his old Juilliard professors.

• “Total Eagle-clipse of the Hart” via .

• Amy Coney Barrett checks out the Folger.

• “Fate of Ophelia” roundup

  • “I love Shakespeare…It holds up!” -Taylor Swift

  • “A German museum has seen hundreds of additional visitors due to a scene in Swift’s new video.” (more)

  • Glamour UK – “In an essay for Howl Round Theatre Commons, Philippa Kelly explores what it might mean for Ophelia to be 30, or even older, as old as Gertrude and still passionately in love with a man who does not want her and will not marry her.”

  • A Shakespeare professor/romance author breaks it down.

  • More Ophelia songs.

• A “bracingly ribald, mordant” Troilus and Cressida with an auntie Pandarus and goth-girl Thersites.

• Paul Tazewell’s designs for Midsummer and Hamlet at the Guthrie. (mid-2000s)

• Benjamin Dryer reminds us that Angela Lansbury played Gertrude opposite Albert Finney’s Hamlet.

• Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies and a reminder from Judi Dench that Oberon and Titania are “two married people having a blazing row.”

• The final letter of the first Union officer to die in the Civil War quotes Hamlet (sort of).

• What does ““yclept” mean and what is it doing in Love’s Labors?4 (also gingerbread)

• The “Bibliotheca Fictiva” that started with a Hamlet forgery.5

• Julia Roberts in a Shakespeare trench coat.

• Shakespeare at Harvard Law.

• The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar.

• An all-female Caesar musical adaptation.

• “In our last show, our summer Shakespeare, we put a huge colorful parachute across our ceiling, blocking the lighting grid.”

• Are we more in Titus or Measure? (Editor’s note: BOTH BAD.)6

• Sarah Schulman’s The Lady Hamlet and Leigh Fondakowski’s Casa Cushman. (+ even more Cushman)

• “Soft you” but make it art.

• Motorcycle Macbeth’s moving motel.

• On Shakespeare and Ibsen: “They’re both dramatists of big ideas—of outsize ambition and huge emotion.”

• Shakespeare playing cards.

• The Bridge Theatre podcast kicks off with Puck.

• “As soon as Macbeth proclaims that men must be master of their times, he gives the orders that unleashes time against him.”

• Malvolio beheads a teddy bear in his rage.

• What professor doesn’t want to be called “one of the wickedest Shakespeare scholars ever.” (more)

• A BSL Macbeth.

• “It’s like being told you were the real Lady Macbeth!”

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Recommendations

• Wari panels.7

• The Broderers of St Paul’s.

• So much theater magic is just crawling.

• Did Tori Amos invent the pumpkin spice latte?

• The rare hyena stalking a diamond mining ghost town.

• A knife that is also a sundial and a gunpowder-powered alarm.

• “I’m prepared to plead professional obligation in partial mitigation”

• “…a few nights later, when only Mrs. Loeffler and her daughter were home, Miller dangled his leg–with only his red undergarments on–through the hole. After Mrs. Miller screamed, Miller calmly said “ta ta” and withdrew his leg.”

• “How am I supposed to focus on my day job, book writing and book-chapter-for-someone-else-writing when there’s Edwardian lady wrestlers slash brothel keepers slash money forgers out there to be found?”