William Shakespeare

Shakespeare Without A Life by Margreta de Grazia

September 2023, no. 457

It is a rare year that goes by without the publication of yet another new biography of William Shakespeare in response to the seemingly insatiable desire for insights into the life and mind of the great writer. The proliferation of life studies isn’t exactly unwarranted: among the most exciting recent discoveries shedding light on how Shakespeare lived is Geoffrey Marsh’s pinpointing of the address at which Shakespeare lived in Saint Helen’s parish in 1598, and Glyn Parry and Catheryn Enis’s identification of numerous writs against John Shakespeare until as late as 1583, when Shakespeare was still a teenager.

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Romeo and Juliet

Bell Shakespeare

by Kirk Dodd •

03 July 2023

Rose Riley as Juliet and Jacob Warner as Romeo (photograph by Brett Boardman).

Bell Shakespeare’s latest production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (directed by Peter Evans) is punctuated by stand-out performances: Lucy Bell, as the Nurse to Juliet, steals the show early, with her accounts of Juliet’s birth and growing up; she lends warmth and a sense of time and place that allows this loving and loveable character to shine...

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Hamnet

Royal Shakespeare Company

by Duncan Wheeler •

09 May 2023

Written prior to the onset of Covid-19, Maggie O’Farrell’s novelistic reimagining of the life and death (in the plague) of Shakespeare’s son was presciently published at the end of March 2020, as the United Kingdom entered lockdown. Three years, and one and a half million sales, later, Hamnet is being made into a film. ... (read more)

Bernhardt/Hamlet

Melbourne Theatre Company

by Diane Stubbings •

10 March 2023

L-R Charles Wu, Tim Walter, Kate Mulvany, John Leary (photograph by Pia Johnson)

More than a century ago, long before gender-blind casting became modish, the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), a woman in her fifties, had the audacious idea that she would play Hamlet. Not only would she – scandalously – don breeches to do so, but she would also defy the critical consensus that Hamlet was a man in his early thirties. ... (read more)

The Tempest

Sydney Theatre Company

by Kirk Dodd •

05 December 2022

Richard Roxburgh as Prospero (photograph by Daniel Boud)

The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘hard rock’ to which Caliban (the only character native to the island) is banished by the lordly Prospero, which reminds us that the island (and perhaps even the play) is Caliban’s domain. ... (read more)

'Emilia: A mock history of an Elizabethan poet' by Diane Stubbings

Essential Theatre

by Diane Stubbings •

14 November 2022

Cessalee Stovall as Emilia (photography by Dylan Hornsby)

William Shakespeare is hiding behind a set of drapes. Wearing baggy black breeches, he is a buffoon, waggishly stalking his prey. His prey is Emilia Bassano, the young and (unusually for the times) educated daughter of a musician at the court of Elizabeth I, a woman who longs to be recognised for ‘how brilliant [her] mind is’. She wants to write and be published ...

The Comedy of Errors

by Tim Byrne •

18 July 2022

One thing is certain: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is flat out hilarious, and if it isn’t funny enough on stage, it’s the fault of the production. His only farce, it is often thought to be an early work, but it is surely far too assured to be written before 1594. It’s entirely free of the striving Marlovian rhetoric that hampers the Henry VI plays (commenced in 1591), and it is cleaner, cleverer, and more convincing than The Taming of the Shrew (probably before 1592). It is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi ...

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Hamlet

by Tim Byrne •

13 May 2022

Back in 1991, Bell Shakespeare opened their very first season with Hamlet, starring John Polson and directed by John Bell himself; it deliberately highlighted the Australian vernacular, almost over-emphasising the flat vowel sounds and local cadences over the fruitier delivery we inherited from the British. It had a gritty contemporary setting, and garishly over-the-top costumes. It also wasn’t very good.

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The Private Life of William Shakespeare by Lena Cowen Orlin

by David McInnis •

April 2022, no. 441

David McInnis reviews 'The Private Life of William Shakespeare' by Lena Cowen Orlin

The basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life – his baptism, early marriage, three children, shareholder status in his playing company, acquisition of a coat of arms, purchase of New Place in Stratford, and his death in 1616 – are well known. Is there anything new to say?

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Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, guilt, and violence in Shakespeare by James Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

by P. Kishore Saval •

April 2022, no. 441

P. Kishore Saval reviews 'Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, guilt, and violence in Shakespeare' by James Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

Familiarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the upper-middle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe.

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