It’s been 60 years since Duke Ellington recorded Such Sweet Thunder, a jazz suite based on Shakespeare’s plays. Eleven songs are linked to Shakespearean characters like Othello and Lady Macbeth, and the final number is a tribute to Shakespeare himself.
Posts Tagged: Shakespeare in American Life
While Shakespeare musicals borrowed plots, characters, and situations from England’s best-known poet, they remained essentially “American.”
This 1934 Shakespeare atlas from the Folger collection contains 19 hand-drawn maps of places (both real and imaginary) from scenes in Shakespeare plays.
Can you feel the feverish excitement in the air? This photograph from April 14, 1936, shows the crowded streets outside the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem on opening night for the Federal Theatre Project’s Macbeth, directed by a young Orson Welles. (He was only 20 years old!) The Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit was a New Deal program under the… Continue Reading »
Growing up on the frontier, Abraham Lincoln had few books to read in his early days—but among them were the works of Shakespeare, which Lincoln cherished throughout his life. The actor Joseph Jefferson later told the story of how Lincoln, as a young lawyer, successfully defended his father’s Illinois theater when a religious revival threatened… Continue Reading »
