It’s all Shakespeare at the moment; inevitable, I guess. And so to the Cockpit Theatre in London, a community theatre tucked away off Lissom Grove, to see a Hamlet that we seldom see – the ‘bad quarto’ Hamlet. There are three different surviving versions of Shakespeare’s play, much to the confusion and secret joy ofRead More
Tag: William Shakespeare
Alluding to Shakespeare
The film programmers among you (real and imaginary) will have noticed that 2016 sees the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and there is an obligation to show something of the man’s works on your screens. With a heavy sigh you turn to the obvious Branaghs and Oliviers, with just maybe Forbidden Planet (perhaps the best-knownRead More
The Bard is back
One of the first posts that I wrote on this blog back in 2012 was one announcing the closure of BardBox, a blog devoted to online Shakespeare videos which I had established in 2008. The plan was to cut back on the several websites that I was managing and to concentrate the writing on aRead More
The disappearing archive
It’s well known how vast YouTube is, and the rate at which it is growing. Recent figures suggest that 400 hours of video are added to the site every minute (back in 2013 it was a mere 100 hours per minute), and that it is serving some six billion video views per day. It isRead More
Henry Four 2
I went to the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury at the weekend; my first visit inside the city’s new theatre. There has long been a Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury – I first went there in the early 1970s to see an Agatha Christie play, when the theatre was on St Margaret’s Street. Then it was rebuiltRead More
Being there
Until now, I’d not been to one of the live video broadcasts into cinemas of theatre productions which have spread so rapidly since the New York Metropolitan Opera introduced them in late 2006. In part this was me being slow off the mark, in part it was apprehension at what I was buying into. Simply,Read More
Staging the world
But els in deep of night when drowsines Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I To the celestial Sirens harmony, That sit upon the nine enfolded Sphears … John Milton, ‘Arcades’ (1634) I spent a great three hours yesterday afternoon at the British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World. It’s been their blockbuster CulturalRead More
Shakespeare’s other screens
Blogs are addictive things. I’ve set up some five or six over the past few years, not to give my petty views of the world but instead devoted to individual subjects where I could report on research discoveries. A couple did quite well – The Bioscope provided information on early and silent cinema and wasRead More