Skimming through Twitter early on a Saturday morning I caught sight of a message from the Before Shakespeare project. It invited its followers to come to an event that afternoon to celebrate and explore the history of The Curtain, one of the first London 16th-century theatres, whose archaeological site was only recently discovered. So offRead More
To Stratford, courtesy of Gravesend last night, seeing a live broadcast of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest close to home and in relative comfort (alas the theatre designed with sufficient consideration to fit my legs has yet to be built). The production has generated much interest because of the use of itsRead More
Fourth and final among these reviews of the year is Shakespeare. 2016 was Shakespeare’s quatercentenary, apart from anything else a great opportunity to use that splendid word – and an annoyance of course when others try to correct it (there is no ‘r’ in quater- – look it up). Specifically, it was four hundred yearsRead More
The former Labour MP Chris Mullin has published an autobiography called Hinterland. Its title comes from the argument, regularly made, that politicians ought to have a background beyond politics, to broaden their view of life. I don’t think it can be proven that having a rich back story inevitably makes you better at politics, norRead More
Not long after YouTube appeared in 2005, I started to take note of the phenomenon of online Shakespeare. I had been interested in Shakespeare and film for a long time – it was really Shakespeare that encouraged my interest in film in the first place – but here was something quite new. Previously Shakespeare filmRead More
Next month, on 23 June, I am introducing the film Amleto at the Bristol Watershed. It’s an Italian film, made in 1917, and yes it’s the story of Hamlet. Among all the celebrations of quatercentenarian William Shakespeare, and among almost every book written on Shakespeare and film, you will find no mention of this gem,Read More
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
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
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
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