Welcome to Shakespeare News
Plus: Happy New Year!
This newsletter has footnotes.1 If you read it in your browser by either clicking on the email headline or visiting shakespearenews.com, the footnotes will appear when you hover over or click on their superscript numbers.2
Great Welcome
A very merry New Year to all, especially to the many new subscribers who joined via Good Tickle Brain!3 I took last week off for general revelry and reading4 and am delighted to be back in your inbox. A quick rundown for folks old and new:
This newsletter is an evolution of the Shakespeare News Tumblr which I’ve run since 2014. The Tumblr was and is a convenient catalogue of interesting bits of Shakespeare. Whenever I need to write a study guide for Romeo and Juliet or find interesting trivia about Hamlet, I check the tags for those plays and can see everything I thought was interesting about them from the last ten years.5
Tumblr remains my favorite internet commonplace book for storing a high volume of small units of categorized information (links, ect.), but it is declined of late and not great for anything other than very-short-form writing.6
Therefore: a Substack! Every week I think, “there can’t possibly be enough news about Shakespeare to fill a newsletter” and every week (so far) I’ve been proven wrong. Let’s see how long it lasts, shall we? Posts may be delayed or nonexistent depending on [life] but I’ll try to keep things regular. Some of my favorites so far:
Timothy West, Antiques Roadshow, and Even More AI Shakespeare
The Princes in the Tower, Grand Theft Hamlet, and Star Wars Macbeth
I also wrote my first magazine feature and McSweeney’s article this year.
Each edition of Shakespeare News includes a featured story or two at the top with links and recommendations below. If something is popular in the news (a big archeological discovery, a West End/Broadway production, anything Richard III-related) there’s an excellent chance I’ll see it.
However, if there is a story you would like me to cover that is off the beaten path, needs more context, or if you want to share feedback,8 please use the comments section at the bottom of each post or send me an email. I don’t promise to include everything9 or change anything, but I do take reader feedback seriously.10
Finally, if Shakespeare News is interesting and useful to you and you think it would be interesting and useful to others, please share it!
You can also follow me on Bluesky and check out my website. There is plenty of Shakespeare work on there but I also occasionally do non-Shakespeare things like translate medieval horse poetry and dramaturg new operas.
Happy New Year, thank you for subscribing, and keep an eye out for a brand new edition of Shakespeare News in your inbox this weekend.
-Kate
Like this one.
This may make for an easier and more pleasant reading experience than scrolling to the bottom of the page. But you do you, please read in whatever way best suits your brain. I discovered this reading hack from the excellent and frequently-footnoted Substack of copy editor Benjamin Dryer.
Our friendship goes back to 2016 and our collaboration includes a whole lot of comics, Hamlet: The Book, and a blog series featuring:
Why Mary Queen of Scots had the severed head of a Macbeth character’s wife brought to her room.
A two-parter on a minor character in Henry VI Part II. He has a Yale residential college (half) named after him, Shakespeare in Love was filmed at his house, and he’s related to (a) Shakespeare.
Thank you for asking, I did indeed manage to chip away at the solid textblock that is Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. This book has everything: Science! Pirates! Baby Ben Franklin! Here’s an excerpt of the aftermath of an encounter with another 18th c. notable:
Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears. (p. 73)
There is also a gorgeously horrifying description of the Great Fire of London (why Third Folios are rare) and if you’ve ever had the task of dividing family heirlooms among multiple stakeholders and want to do it better using math, may I recommend the author’s Cryptonomicon. ("Can something have negative emotional value?") Also good for WWII/code-breaking/submarine buffs, or those who want to settle once and for all whether they are actually into submarines or really just Sean Connery.
Need to program an evening of Shakespeare and Dance or Shakespeare and Music? There are tags for those too.
Newsletters in general and Substack in particular also have the advantage of appearing in your inbox. While you can set up an RSS feed for a Tumblr and use an aggregator (I prefer Feedly) to keep up with blogs that post regularly but don’t send updates, this is easier. However, the Shakespeare News Tumblr will continue to update 1-2 times daily and will include bits that don’t appear in the newsletter; usually videos and photos that I want to archive but that don’t feel particularly current or newsworthy.
A huge thank you to Jordan Schneider over at ChinaTalk for his advice to switch from date-based headlines to content-based headlines. The man knows what he is doing and also runs a mean podcast.
Anything explicit or Oxfordian in nature will be deleted and you will be blocked. Have a nice day!
See above.
If I’m improperly pluralizing Oedipus or spelling Michael Caine’s name wrong (both real/recent examples), please tell me! Also if you saw a cool bus, please tell me that too.