William Shakespeare
Shakespeare is not a hoax, but he is hoaxy. The field of Shakespeare studies is brimming with fibs and fables. There are the ‘Shakespeare heretics’ who have posited, on flimsy evidence, that Henry Neville, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or someone else was the ‘secret author’ of William Shakespeare’s works. There have been plenty of frauds and near-frauds on the ‘orthodox’ side of Shakespeare studies as well. A.L. Rowse, for example, simply made up an elaborate back story for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
... (read more)The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters
On the wooden floorboards of a bare and slightly raised stage, a king draws a chalk circle: perfect, empty, unbroken. Behind him, twelve empty seats wait and watch. Before him, the audience.
The empty circle is Lear’s kingdom, but it is also a diagram of a disastrous decision to carve up his family alongside his lands and wealth. The circle haunts th ...
You can make the case that Othello’s handkerchief is the most consequential prop in all of Shakespeare. Yorick’s skull and Macbeth’s floating dagger are more iconic, but neither is integral to the action of the plays in which they feature. The handkerchief, on the other hand, really is the whole of the tragedy of Othello.
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What image does Romeo and Juliet conjure for you? How high is your balcony? In Shakespeare’s play, vertical distance is a nod to the Petrarchan courtly love conventions that placed the lady on a pedestal. But, like a lot of conventions, Shakespeare calls up this one only to implode it.
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Straight Acting by Will Tosh & The Hollow Crown by Eliot A. Cohen
Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of course) as Romeo.
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