Benny Hill, Margaritaville, and Scotch
Plus: "Kean kept one of Cooke’s toes"
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It is bad enough that renowned 19th c. Shakespearean actor2 George Frederick Cooke was buried far from his UK home in a Manhattan graveyard. But then Edmund Kean stole his toe, Edwin Booth kept a tooth, and his skull ended up in a community theater production of Hamlet in New Jersey 150 years after his death.3
Kean kept one of Cooke’s toes as a relic on the “altar” of his mantelpiece, until his wife threw the treasure out a window in disgust4…The skull was offered on loan to “responsible” institutions in search of a prop.5 In November 1980, Cooke’s skull was staged in a Mercer Community College production of Hamlet at West Windsor, New Jersey.6
This is the kind of board member we need right now.
To celebrate the “Scottish Play,” join Board President Chris Frost for an exclusive pre-show tasting flight of Scotch from his personal collection.
Talks roundup: Vivienne Benesch on Measure, Evren Odçikin on As You Like It, Lue Douthit et al. on Antony and Cleopatra, and Carl Cofield, Ty Jones, and Chris Berry on Othello,
Len Cariou on “Epiphany” via The Sondheim Hub:
See, I had just played King Lear at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. So when I saw “Epiphany,” I said, “Ah, this is Lear on the heath.”
I’m fine never seeing Holofernes again, but if you must situate him in the history of Renaissance pedants, by all means…
Benny Hill as Bottom via Little Theatre Histories.
The trend of casting beloved comedy actors as Bottom continued, and benefitted both Shakespeare and popularized the trope of bad performance.
Site-Specific Shakespeare (open access)
Please report back on the Park’s Winter’s Tale bear.
“The one thing I really didn’t want to do was have a man in a bear suit chasing the actor across the stage. It’s just too funny. It’s possible that Shakespeare wanted it to be rather comic. But we find it rather tragic. So we’re doing it in a way that I think will be somewhat surprising. I’m not going to tell you. People will have to come and see.”
Susanna Clarke on Virginia Woolf’s happy invalid + Shakespeare.
“People have been asking me, ‘Why the hell Henry VI?’ It’s so problematic,” Mia confessed. “The writing is young, young Shakespeare. I can’t even remember when I got obsessed by it.” It was most likely in class with Frankel. “Everyone was doing the molehill monologue. I read the play and found it fascinating.”
In his production concept, director Stefanos Koroneos reimagines Prospero as an exiled filmmaker clinging to a crumbling 1980s studio, where the island becomes a memory-scape of film, love, and trauma endlessly re-staged.
Shakespeare and Jefferson + Quoting Shakespeare in early America7
Look. I get it. Content is hard. Still, I would be delighted to never see another Shakespeare bracket or “[insert celebrity here] vs. Shakespeare” quiz. Though this is mildly charming.8
Pericles. It’s one of his last. And he didn’t write it all. So that might have been Wilkins.
Clocks in Love’s Labour’s Lost.9
I was initially confused when Genesius Guild's Andy Shearouse explained both the entire plot of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and that the set was designed to represent the inner workings of a broken cuckoo clock. One might think both concepts would be self-explanatory.
Recommendations
I think I was attracted to acting…because…I have this fear that I’m doing the wrong thing…Acting had this kind of very prescribed set of behaviors. I had to walk to this square and cry. And to me it’s cathartic because I get to be emotional and walking to the square, no one’s going to yell at me. I know I’m supposed to walk to that square. That’s where the box of light is and I have to stand in the box of light.
KA MOUNTAIN. (more)
“It is a thoughtful comma, an intentional comma, a scary comma, a portentous comma, and I love it dearly.” via Benjamin Dreyer
© 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Like this one.
In addition to Macbeth and Iago, he also played Sir Pertinax MacSycophant and Sir Archy McSarcasm.
If I had known about this when Mya Gosling and I were working on Stick-Figure Hamlet, this story would 100% be in the “skull” section. Buy it anyway, it contains a delightful flaming-root-vegetable Yorick. More on “using real skulls for Hamlet.”
…and it may still be possible to use it in your Hamlet:
Excitingly, I have been informed by F. Michael Angelo, the Archivist and Head of Historic Collections at Thomas Jefferson University's Scott Memorial Library that the theatrical career of his skull may not be over! He has plans to make a scan of it, and to license it for 3-D printing. Theater companies who require a skull for Yorick in a production of Hamlet could digitally download the skull, and use it for a prop! Please get in touch with him if that's what you're in the market for!
I’m now writing a companion piece to I Hate Hamlet where the furious ghost of George Frederick Cooke haunts the $@%# out of some very confused, very '80s, New Jersey community theater kids. Did you know that that South Jersey tried to secede the same month as the production? And Ronald Reagan was elected? Imagine trying to explain trickle-down economics to the alcoholic ghost of an 18th c. Shakespeare actor. The Reagan/Regan confusion alone! Someone will try to feed his headless trunk a slurpee.
My favorite remains Abigail Adams casually quoting Coriolanus.
“There’s a dog in this play” may persist but only if there are pictures of the Very Good Boy.
“My 11-year-old concluded that the reason nobody stages it very often is because ‘it’s boring.’”
Thanks for including our interview with Len Cariou! Looking forward to reading the Susanna Clarke piece too — I've thought about Piranesi so much since reading it...