Frenemies, Hitchcock, and the Matrix

Plus: An Union

This newsletter has footnotes.¹ If you prefer not to scroll down, click on the email headline to read in-browser and they will appear when you click on them. I use open access and gift links whenever possible but you may encounter paywalls. If you do, make like Romeo and o’erperch them or check the archive. If you enjoy this newsletter, please send it to your friends, romans, countrymen! Use the button below or your most reliable friar.

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Quick Links

• Which of Shakespeare’s frenemies called him an upstart crow? Nashe vs. Greene edition. (more)

• When Emily Folger is a Jeopardy clue and also your great-great aunt.

• Prize Alert! Nominate your favorite high school English teacher² for the Parr Prize for Excellence in Teaching Shakespeare for a chance at $10,000 and a trip to “an attractive location - generally in Palm Beach County, Florida.”

  • Submitted by David Scott Kastan, who is not only a brilliant scholar but also one of the most remarkable and generous teachers I’ve ever had. He wrote a 3am email that allowed our class to spend the final semester of college in a joyful daze of Shakespeare and responded to anxious invitations to undergraduate theater productions with a level of enthusiasm deserving of both gratitude and combat pay.

• Is Othello a “bro show”?

  Edward Price wouldn’t be mistaken for a Broadway junkie…But in recent weeks, he’s been an unlikely Broadway regular, venturing alone to see two plays: “Othello” …and “Glengarry Glen Ross…” “We want to see a good, solid male psyche. We want to see the full extent of the male experience,” said Price, a political economist. “You don’t always get that in theater.”

• Is Coriolanus the play of [*gestures at the world*] our times?

• Roy Kent on Shakespeare (h/t Gemma Allred)

• “When the election happened, she says, “the [show’s] sentiment of ‘the youth are f*cked’ felt very real to me..”³

• Is Hamlet a total head case? via

  Marks & Vincentelli

• Performance round up: King John in The Matrix, an two-person aerial Midsummer, clowns reading Shakespeare, Shakespeare for club rats.

• “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction the face” vs. “the art of peering into people’s faces and uncovering deceit may be honed to astonishing precision.”

• Modernizing Shakespearean subtitles using AI. (Thanks, I hate it, “a degree in Elizabethan English” is not a thing.)

• The Bridge Theatre’s caged and labeled Hippolyta has shades of “We’ll have thee as our rarer monsters are” / “let them signify under my sign” / “He'll lead me, then, in triumph”⁴

• What is Othello supposed to look like?

• “Men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”

• You can visit one of Shakespeare’s signatures in London right now.

• The ritual roots of Shakespeare via

  Adam Walker
  .

• OSF has a new interim exec and an union. (shall he throw/grow together)

• Judi recommends the Millais Ophelia.

• Related: What is the best thing that has happened to you on stage? (paywall)

  Being on stage as a statue, then coming back to life as Hermione every night in The Winter’s Tale. Knowing that the audience was going to gasp was incredible.

  Doing that with Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench was wonderful. There is nothing like Judi’s voice…

• The real revelation of that Patti profile:

  She left “Evita” after twenty-one months, because “I lost my sense of humor,” she said. She declined an offer to play Lady Macbeth⁵ at Lincoln Center—“I said, ‘Haven’t I just been playing her for two years?’ ”—and instead went into “As You Like It” at the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, because she wanted to work with the Romanian director Liviu Ciulei. (During that show’s run, she got kicked out of Prince’s night club after she screamed at some people who were booing her cousin’s punk band.)

• A verse workshop with Actors from the London stage.

• Doug Hughes directs Liev Schreiber as Iago.

• Color conscious casting from Shakespeare to Bridgerton.

• “Trumpets were brought under the scaffold that he might not be heard.” feels very Richard III.

• “The 2025 ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ directed by Jamie Lloyd featured Tom Hiddleston as Benedick, instructed to show off his abdominal musculature rather than his wit..” (Yes. And?)

• Jasmine Bracey is directing Twelfth Night in Texas and you should probably go see it.⁶

• Four things you might not know about queer history and Shakespeare.

• Why Hitchcock never made Hamlet. (but Disney did.)

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Recommendations

• Ceramic heels.

• The art of the bow.

• Champagne Charlie.

• Forensic ornithology.

• The Greensleeves Project.⁷

• Printable sixteenth-century prosthetics.

• Pushing the National Archives’ buttons.

• “More details another time, they’ll be in my memoirs.”

1. Like this one.

2. Jane Mallison. My seventh grade English teacher who responded to my middle school declaration that I was “so Puck” with amusement rather than scorn and is the reason I’m writing this at all.

3. I wrote about exactly this: “While this may have landed as audacious, exciting, shake-up-the-usual boring-classical-theater marketing copy when the play was first announced, it hit differently at 2pm on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.”

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5. She believes in the curse.

6. And listen to her Worcester.

7. Lady Greensleeves played Imogen with Shakespeare’s Globe’s Youth Theatre.