Recently New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley extolled the virtues of reading plays out loud in your living room as a way to while away the COVID-19 time at home. Memories of his own time reading Hamlet as a child opposite his mother “have been much on my mind in this time of shuttered… Continue Reading »
Here’s how to watch Shakespeare from home this month, featuring performances from your favorite theater companies and films on streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix.
You may know that April 23 is the day we mark William Shakespeare’s birth and death. But what else do you know about his life and family? Test your knowledge with this quiz.
Need some quality poetry to help you through these difficult times? Sir Patrick Stewart has been reading a Shakespeare sonnet a day on Twitter.
In this excerpt from her new book, This is Shakespeare (published Mar 31 in the United States), Emma Smith probes the biographical interpretations that readers have layered over Shakespeare’s plays, particularly The Tempest, and how that shapes what we think of as their chronology and the arc of Shakespeare’s life and career. Underpinning these interpretations… Continue Reading »
There may not be a more insulted character in all of Shakespeare’s canon than Richard III. The woman he’s wooing, Anne, calls him a hedgehog. In the very next scene, Queen Margaret calls him an “abortive, rooting hog,” a “bottled spider,” and a “poisonous bunch-backed toad” (Richard III I.3.239, 256, 260-261). And this isn’t the… Continue Reading »
