Mortimers, Mormons, and Mad Kings
Plus: "the ideological implications of the unclothed or partially clothed body"
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Sara Holdren is one of my favorite writers.2 Her Shakespeare crash course for Vulture is worth the price of a subscription ($4).
At the overnight Shakespeare camp that changed my little life as a 16-year-old (your kids can still go there today!), a teacher told us, “Shakespeare is like sex. Eventually it’s fantastic, but the first time it’s hard and confusing and you have to keep looking up words.” Leaving aside the appropriateness of this simile in a room full of teenagers, he wasn’t wrong.
Perhaps, but we’re not so fond of artifice these days. Americans in particular are woefully addicted to the idea of authenticity…But when you’ve got to look at the love of your life and say, not “I, like, really love you,” but “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,” you can’t resort to some easy contemporary notion of the “real.” You have to expand to meet the poetry, which ultimately teaches you that you’re larger than you may have thought.
Malosso told visitors the site was one of the world's "oldest and largest amphitheatres" and dated back to AD 393. He claimed that Julius Caesar had visited it on his return to Rome from Egypt with Cleopatra, and that Shakespeare's Juliet Capulet had lived in an old church there…Suspicions began to emerge in 2016. Archaeologists…discovered that the “ancient” structure contained fibreglass, papier-mâché columns…
A barnstormer of a speech by Sam White on the future of Shakespeare in Detroit. (donate here)
“Our entire history has required us to be overachievers even though we’ve been under-resourced.”
More Stratford interviews (previous Polley and Cimolino). Listening to William Hutt (Lear in the last season of Slings and Arrows) is a delight and there are some wild Tiny Alice stories.3
“I’ve never heard a Lady Macbeth deliver this line correctly…”
“What makes a classical actor?” “First of all, breath…”
“What would you say to young director who’s going to direct you today?” “…You’re going to be afraid of me. And that’s good.”
“…the space itself allows you – not only allows you, but demands – that you be absolutely honest.”
See, now I can’t un-imagine Richard III following Edward around with a haddock.
In 1481 Edward IV of England was granted his own dispensation, “the pope having learned that fish is injurious to his health, and that if he made a long use thereof his life would be in danger.”
Lindsey Snyder interpreting “crush a cup of wine” is a work of art.
You have a couple more hours to bid on a McKellen-signed + doodled Macbeth.
“To capture what we wanted to do, which was a sort of Shakespearean history play, a Shakespearean tragedy, we needed to follow some of those stories through to their conclusion,” Macmillan said…That a version of his work might debut in Shakespeare’s hometown, “blew my mind,” Martin wrote in an email. “I could not conceive of a greater honor as his influence is all over my Westeros books.”
…when Brigham Young sent the first group to settle what would become Iron County, one of the first things that group did upon arriving was put on a production of “The Merchant of Venice.”…During an 1864 production of “Macbeth,” for example, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was brought in to sing the parts of the witches…
As You Like It in a lavender maze, with puppet hugs, and plus Groff via The Sondheim Hub.
Five Disturbing Facts About the Shakespearean Stage via Rebekah King.
There is no easy way to summarize Mortimer:
“…the figure in this play is a conflation of three historical Mortimers: the known rebel, his brother the unfortunate prisoner and the (historically loyal) uncle of Richard.”
Learn Shakespeare, win Jeopardy.
As the famous thinking music faded out during Final Jeopardy, I scribbled that Shakespeare wrote “Blood will have blood” in Titus Andronicus (38 mentions) rather than Macbeth (467—yeesh).
“Nude Shakespeare seeks to examine the ideological implications of the unclothed or partially clothed body in film and on the stage.”
The murder of Carrie Brown, a possible Jack the Ripper victim known as “Old Shakespeare” for “her habit of quoting William Shakespeare during drinking games.”
A World Elsewhere at the Globe sounds delightful.
“For the production’s opening movements, they explained the rules of improvisation, instructed audience members on basic fight choreography (one little girl got to distance-slap the entire upper gallery at once)..”
“If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI.”
“We know that there are in the business what we call the ‘Golden 10’…The 10 Shakespeare plays that are very, very popular. We find that we’re coming back around to these plays about every decade.”
Sure, but why have “just so happens” when you can have “music cures death”?4
Many modern performances of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles have framed the action so that the “revived” characters are not actually dead and the music just so happens to coincide with the moment they reveal that they were alive.
What New York is supposed to feel like.
“It’s not just when they make a donation that they get to see the show,” said Eustis of uber-wealthy donors. “They absolutely viscerally feel that — sitting in that theater when 75% of the audience hasn’t paid a penny to be there — they are getting to be part of their dream city. They’re feeling, ‘Oh, this is what New York is supposed to feel like.’”
“Penile codpiece” is redundant.
Less happily, substantial rewriting introduces the figure of Queen Elizabeth I to the masque staged amid the climactic anti-romantic interactions, including jokes about her sex life and vagina…in the scene in which the three would-be abstinent men are disguised as Muscovites, they sport golden penile codpieces and nippled shoulder pads.
Eric Bogosian’s Shakespearean start:
After an English teacher had him play Lord Capulet, Juliet’s father—“I rose to the occasion, very histrionic”—he joined the theatre club, where a “marvellous” teacher had students write plays.
The two productions’ interpretations of Banquo’s death were strikingly similar. In the Hungarian State Opera’s version, proof of Banquo’s murder was delivered in a plastic bag carrying his severed head. At the Bavarian State Opera, the head dropped from the proscenium during the scene in which Macbeth seeks the witches’ further counsel, only to have it borne off by a dog, who got some laughs.
When Miranda, waking from a slumber, complains of “heaviness,” Branagh jiggled his hips as he playfully urged her to “shake it off!” It was a rare moment of abandon in a studiedly restrained performance.
“I asked if they'd want to play Pericles' family, and they got on stage shouting "son, come home!" And then he rolled a four and died horribly.”
Recommendations
Pleats via Paul Lukas.
“As you were with me all that fateful day and probably less drunk…”
“The difference between innovation and gimmick is in the execution.” via Jessa Crispin.
…cohesion is the ability of a unit to hold together under pressure…armies cannot be built out of a tiny handful of saints and sociopaths, they must be built out of regular men.
© 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Like this one.
Her remembrance of Tom Stoppard was beautiful and how can you not love “energy-sucking butt magnets”?
“I don't want realism. I want magic!”
Establishing ensemble through military history since…
Love that observation from William Hutt. I’ve been banging on for several years about the importance of prepositions in Shakespeare and how underused they are by modern actors.