Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos write about stage adaptations of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” that engage with Día de los Muertos traditions, reframing Shakespeare’s meditations on life and death according to Indigenous and Latinx worldviews.
Helen Hackett explores Shakespeare’s use of the soliloquy in “Hamlet,” including the famous “To be or not to be” speech, in this excerpt from her new book, “The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty,” published by Yale University Press.
Robert Eggers’s “The Northman” is not an adaptation of “Hamlet,” but a film in conversation with Shakespeare’s play, Austin Tichenor writes.
Hamlet sings! A new opera version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is onstage now at the Metropolitan Opera, with tenor Allan Clayton resuming the title role that he played for the opera’s world premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017. Read our Q&A with Allan Clayton.
Austin Tichenor draws connections between Hamlet and Batman, noting the range of interpretations.
In a recent post on the Folger’s Collation blog, assistant curator Elizabeth DeBold shared a small set of photographs, newly added to the Folger collection, that document a 1933 Japanese production of Hamlet: These five photos provide a glimpse of a production of Hamlet performed at the Tsukiji Shogekijo, the “Tsukiji Little Theater,” aptly named… Continue Reading »
In June, Ian McKellen will take the stage as the title character in Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor. McKellen is no stranger to the role: he played Hamlet in Prospect Theatre Company’s touring production a half century ago. It may seem surprising to find an octogenarian—McKellen turns 82 this month—playing the part of the… Continue Reading »
When it comes to the theatrical landscape of Shakespeare’s London, there are the plays whose names we are familiar with — plays like Hamlet and Henry V — and then there are the plays that were being performed around the same time and that Shakespeare’s audiences would have known well, but that are lost to us today. Read an excerpt from a new book about these plays.
Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s fundamental artifice becomes its strength. Theater’s very artificiality becomes a feature, not a bug. Shakespeare utilized this trick to both amplify subtext and heighten the drama.
“To be or not to be” – do you know what comes after? This quiz challenges you to drag and drop the lines of Hamlet’s famous speech into the correct order.
