Headless Teddy Bears, Naughty Swans, and a "Weasel-Like" Academic (defamatory)

October Shakespeare News

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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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Quick Links

• 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 Helen Castor.

• 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!”

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?”

1. Like this one.

2. Ian McKellen has thoughts.

3. Also includes: “a panegyric about panis.”

4. And McB, but without the “y.”

5. John Payne Collier made up A-LOT of $&%#.

6. Related/on the nose.

7. Like a Rothko, but 1,200 years old and made from feathers.