Stick Figures, Sweaters, and Sleep No More

Plus: Happy 462nd Birthday!

Happy Shakespeare Day! In celebration of The Birthday, please enjoy this bonus edition of Shakespeare News. I have also turned on paid subscriptions.¹ This newsletter is free but if you want to support my work and help me do more of it:

You can also share the newsletter with your friends, Romans, etc.

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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Quick Links

• 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)

• Louis Butelli 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 Simon’s British Mythology Substack.

• The Woman Who Brought Shakespeare to Lisbon via Black in Portugal.

• 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 Ron Charles.

• Pulp! The Classics Romeo and Juliet.

• Family fun at Bothworth! via Londonist

1. Remuneration!

2. My favorite bonus bit in the book is the “Gertrude Index,” Or, “What happens when you subtract the age of the actor playing Hamlet from the age of the actor playing Gertrude?” The answer may be negative! Find out more.

3. I mean. C’mon.

4. Not separating out the 4s and 6s is the act of a coward.

5. Interrupting the the opening fight with [enter Godzilla] reminds me of the Rude Mech’s Method Gun, which I saw at an impressionable age and absolutely broke my brain. There were many memorable moments, but my favorite was a tiger informing the audience, “Remember, any moment, I could run through and eat the person you are most bored with! Rowr!” If you are bored in the first five minutes of R&J …godspeed… but imagining a tiger – or Godzilla – eating the most boring character onstage has gotten me through many a self-indulgent Shakespeare.

6. #1 – I would request and entreat you to hear this in Marisa Tomei’s voice. #2 – “May have gone temporarily by the pseudonym “William Shakeshaft’” is a) incorrect b) the primrose path to the conspiracist pipeline.