What are the connections between traditional folktales and Shakespeare’s plays? Charlotte Artese, an English professor at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, sets out to explore these folktale sources in a new anthology of stories, Shakespeare and the Folktale, published October 22. “Both folktales and Shakespeare’s plays are cultural survivors, thriving in scores of languages and… Continue Reading »
Posts Categorized: Off-the-shelf
Here in This Island We Arrived: Shakespeare and Belonging in Immigrant New York is a 2019 book from Elisabeth H. Kinsley that explores Shakespeare performance in late 19th- and early 20-century Manhattan during a time of profound demographic change, when New York City’s foreign-born population grew from under half a million in 1880 to almost… Continue Reading »
Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith takes 20 chapters to discuss 20 different Shakespeare plays in her new book This Is Shakespeare, offering insights on key characters, plot twists, and performance challenges. The excerpt below, which focuses on the character of Falstaff and his physical description, comes from the chapter on 1 Henry IV, the play where… Continue Reading »
In Benet Brandreth’s historical thriller “The Assassin of Verona,” William Shakespeare is disguised as a steward to the English ambassador in 1586 Venice.
What happens after “The Tempest” ends? “Miranda in Milan,” Katharine Duckett’s debut novel, picks up where Shakespeare’s play leaves off.
This new book by Andrew McConnell Stott is about David Garrick and the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Read an excerpt from “The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet,” a memoir by the star of Franco Zeffirelli’s classic film.
In his recent memoir, “Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite,” Roger Daltrey of The Who writes, among other things, about playing the Dromio twins in the BBC’s TV movie of “The Comedy of Errors” (1983).
Inspired by a real-life episode, Simon Mayo’s novel ‘Mad Blood Stirring’ tells the powerful story of a Shakespeare production by African American prisoners of war at Dartmoor prison in England, near the end of the War of 1812.
From rudeness to gross behavior, Ruth Goodman’s book “How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England” sheds some surprising light on what bad behavior really meant, including the reason that Shakespeare had Sampson threaten to “bite my thumb” at another character in the first scene of “Romeo and Juliet.”
