John Tufts is an award-winning actor and the author of “Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table,” a cookbook featuring over 150 authentic recipes straight out of Shakespeare’s plays. Here, he shares his recipe for a roast joint of mutton, inspired by a line from Henry IV, Part 2.
The excerpt begins: “Dante, poet and man, is obsessive. This is particularly true in the Latin meaning of the word: besiege or be besieged. Shakespeare’s protagonists sometimes are obsessive or besieged. Yet they can and do change. Leontes emerges from his madness. Prospero acknowledges Caliban, this thing of darkness, as his own. Falstaff dies, plucking at flowers and singing the twenty-third Psalm. Dante or Shakespeare? We need not choose. Who are we to choose? They choose us or pass us by.”
There are a ton of places to watch Shakespeare in October, both online and in-person. Here’s what the Folger’s theater partners are up to this month.
Shakespeare’s witches haven’t always terrified audiences. For a century and more – from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries – actors played these parts for laughs. During the period in which Shakespeare became “the Bard”, the witches in fact brought a large dose of comedy to Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy. The origins of this surprising, but long-lasting, stage interpretation go back to 1664.
Take this quiz to see if you remember what comes after famous lines from Shakespeare plays like “All the world’s a stage” and “Parting is such sweet sorrow”.
One of the lasting achievements of the extended COVID quarantine will surely be an extraordinary archive of the complete works of William Shakespeare performed on Zoom by casts from around the world, under the umbrella title The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO).
