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Early life in Stratford

• Career in the theatre
• Private life
• The tributes of his colleagues
• Anecdotes and documents
• The intellectual background
• Changes in language
• Shakespeare’s literary debts
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• The dating of Shakespeare’s plays
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• Titus Andronicus
• The early romantic comedies
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• Romeo and Juliet
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• Julius Caesar
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• Collaborations and spurious attributions
• Shakespeare’s sources
• Questions of authorship
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• Seventeenth century
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• Deconstruction
• Chronology of Shakespeare’s plays

How did Shakespeare die?

Why is shakespeare still important today.

William Shakespeare

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What was Shakespeare's family like?

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway , eight years his senior, when he was 18. They had three children: Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died at the age of 11.

How many plays did Shakespeare write?

There is some dispute about how many plays Shakespeare wrote. The general consensus is 37. 

How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets . The most famous include Sonnet 18, with opening lines “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”, and Sonnet 130, which begins “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

The cause of Shakespeare's death is unknown. However, the vicar of the local church wrote in his journal some fifty years later that “Shakespeare, Drayton , and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.” The account cannot be verified but has led some scholars to speculate that Shakespeare may have died of typhus.

Shakespeare remains vital because his plays present people and situations that we recognize today. His characters have an emotional reality that transcends time, and his plays depict familiar experiences, ranging from family squabbles to falling in love to war. The fact that his plays are performed and adapted around the world underscores the universal appeal of his storytelling.

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William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon) was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.

Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature . Other poets, such as Homer and Dante , and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens , have transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre , are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson , that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.

It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England .

Shakespeare the man

Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms , marriages , deaths , and burials ; wills , conveyances , legal processes, and payments by the court—these are the dusty details. There are, however, many contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton.

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon , Warwickshire , shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough , who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor , before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity . His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)

Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster’s salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy’s education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic, rhetoric , and other studies then followed there would have interested him.

Instead, at age 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and “ Anne Hathaway of Stratford,” upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles [3.2 km] from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died 11 years later.)

How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not known. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries . In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare’s life have often been made from the internal “evidence” of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was clearly a writer who without difficulty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.

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Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance for Arden Shakespeare, (London: Methuen, 2013)

How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.

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Shakespeare’s complexity, and his profoundest ‘metatheatre’, this chapter suggests, is angled to the ways in which the physical reality of the stage met the fictions enacted upon it. Exploring the meaning of stage space as location and prop, this chapter argues that Shakespeare used his theatre’s construction itself as a prime locus of imaginative power. As few structural features beyond that of the stage itself have been written about, the argument looks at what surrounded the stage from below (the ‘hell’ with its ‘trap’), from above (the ‘heaven[s]’), on the stage level itself (‘earth’ and its ‘pillars’), and from behind (the ‘scene’ with its ‘balcony’ and ‘ladders’; and the ‘tiring-house’ with its stage ‘bell’). In doing so, it investigates the various statements, metaphors and analogies the stage made for and about itself, and their interpretative ramifications for Shakespeare.

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A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance

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This short history of Shakespeare in global performance – from the reopening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day – provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical afterlife and introduces categories of analysis and understanding to make that afterlife intellectually meaningful. Written for both the advanced student and the practicing scholar, this work enables readers to situate themselves historically in the broad field of Shakespeare performance studies and equips them with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for making their own contributions to the field.

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Etudes Episteme, n°33, Profane Shakespeare. Perfection, Pollution, and the Truth of Performance, dir. Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Karen Britland et Line Cottegnies, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/1977

Clotilde Thouret

Compared to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare seems far more discreet, or even removed from the controversy about the theatre. But appearances can be deceiving: although less visible and more oblique, his responses to the attacks against the stage are nonetheless present in his plays. Against the enemies of the stage who identify theatre as a source of profanation and pollution of bodies and souls, most of the defenders emphasize the virtuous exemplarity of performance. Shakespeare responds in a provocative manner and elaborates another conception of theatre, involving the actor as well as the spectator. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Hamlet reproduce the theatrophobic accusations against actors and the contamination of the spectator by the passions performed on stage. Yet even as he accumulates elements of accusatory discourse, the playwright displaces the terms in order to think through the emotional (and thus necessarily impure) experience of theatre and give it a social and moral function: the actor’s art turns into a form of magic devoid of supernatural qualities and the spectator’s reception is redefined as intelligence through emotions.

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Dramatic Criticism in Shakespeare's Time

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The more fully informed we are about earlier theatres in other societies, however remote and alien, the more we discover exactly what expectations were shared by their audiences and met by theatre professionals then and now. This certainly includes the medieval antecedents of the Shakespearean theatre, for the mystery plays covered biblical history in a spirit of ultimate trust in divine providence reflected in the very title of Dante's Divine Comedy . Even earlier the great Aristotle, precursor of so many later theorists, admitted in his Poetics that his preference for deeply depressing plays was not shared by his fellow Athenians. He preferred plays with a single plot about the downfall of one great man, and proceeded to prescribe in detail how that distressing kind of plot should be presented. His terms have been largely accepted by influential later critics like Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetrie , and rigorously codified by successive neoclassicists who have tried for centuries to enforce their "rules" on theatre professionals with questionable success in many cases. Nevertheless Aristotle himself had to concede the existence of at least one alternative mode to his ideal:

Second in quality is the kind of plot some put first. I mean the plot having a double arrangement, like that of the Odyssey, and concluding in opposite ways for the good and the bad. It seems to be first in rank because of the weakness of the spectators. For the poets in their compositions follow the wishes of the audience. (Gilbert, 86-7)

For Aristotle, theatre audiences are wrong and intellectuals like himself know better what artists should do. Not all scholars, critics and theatre professionals have agreed with him, including many known and imitated by Shakespeare. For example, in the sixteenth century, an Italian academic well-versed in Aristotle, called Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio (usually identified as Cinthio in English studies of Shakespeare's sources) asserted the right of later authors to defy Aristotle's prescriptions: "To speak generally, authors who are judicious and skillful in composition should not so restrain their liberty within the bounds set by their predecessors that they dare not set foot outside the old paths" (269). Another even more orthodox Renaissance follower of Aristotle named Ludovico Castelvetro nevertheless accepts the artist's obligations to his modern audience:

Now, because poetry has been discovered, as I say, to delight and recreate the common people, it should have as its subject those things that can be understood by the common people and when understood can make them happy. These are the things that happen every day and that are spoken of among the people, and that resemble historical accounts and the latest reports about the world. (Gilbert, 308)

Cinthio was not only a critic but also a practitioner of the arts, and his theatrical practice confirms the opinions of the more narrowly academic Castelvetro about the "secondary" class of tragedy and its positive impact on audiences regretted by Aristotle:

I have composed some [tragedies] with happy endings, the Altile, the Selene, the Antivalomeni, and others merely as a concession to the spectators and to make the plays appear more pleasing on the stage, and that I may be more in conformity with the custom of our time. . . . And in this sort of play often for the greater satisfaction and better instruction of those who listen, they who are the cause of disturbing events, by which the persons of ordinary goodness in the drama have been afflicted, are made to die or suffer great ills. . . . It gives extraordinary pleasure to the spectator when he sees the astute trapped and deceived at the end of the drama, and the unjust and the wicked finally overthrown. (Gilbert, 256-7)

Shakespeare certainly knew and liked Cinthio's works, for his Hecatommithi (a collection of short stories) provided plots for Measure for Measure and Othello . So it is not surprising that Cinthio's positivist criteria for drama might apply generally to Shakespeare's plays, even to so negative a drama as King Lear , for all the evil characters in it do die: Goneril, Cornwall, Regan, Oswald, and Edmund. Even the murdered Cordelia is not innocent, since her obtuseness initiates the whole disaster, including a French invasion of England, something Shakespeare clearly shows to be disgraceful in King John . As for the deaths of both Gloucester and Lear, they might be properly attributed to natural causes, simply from old age, not murder. Gloucester certainly dies from excess of happiness on rediscovering his lost son Edgar, and one possible reading may suggest that even Lear dies hopeful of Cordelia's survival. At least in the Folio, authority in his kingdom seems to be taken over by Edgar—the name of one of the most successful kings in British history (see individual play entry). In attacking critics' attempts to limit classification of drama into just two categories, tragedy which ends sadly and comedy which ends happily, Cinthio goes on to say: "Critics fall into this error because they were of the opinion that there cannot be a tragedy which ends happily" (Gilbert, 257). In postulating the superiority of the mixed, positive category of tragedy, he is backed up by Guarini who asserts that his version of it appeals to all levels and types of humanity:

Truly, if today men understood how to compose tragicomedy (for it is not an easy thing to do), no other drama should be put on the stage, for tragicomedy is able to include all good qualities of drama and to reject all bad ones; it can delight all dispositions, all ages and all tastes—something that is not true of the other two, tragedy and comedy, which are at fault because they go to excess. (Gilbert, 512)

Another theatre practitioner, the Spaniard Lope de Vega, sardonically adopts a similar posture in rejecting the high art advocated by the followers of Aristotle, whom he pretends to be addressing respectfully. He argues that such high art as they require simply will not sell, and so he is obliged to surrender to popular tastes:

Not that I am unaware of the rules; thank God that even as an apprentice to grammar I had already read the books which treated of these subjects. . . . But I finally found that the plays in Spain at that time were not as their early makers in the world thought they should be written, but as many untutored writers treated them who worked for the public according to its own rude ways, and thus insinuated themselves into favor to such an extent that whoever now writes plays with art dies without fame or reward. . . . It is true that I have written [plays] in accordance with the art, that few know, but later when from others I saw proceed monstrous things full of theatrical apparatus, to which the crowd and the women who canonize this sad business came running, I returned to the barbarous manner, and when I have to write a play I lock the rules away with six keys; . . . and I write in the manner of devisers who aspired to the acclaim of the crowd; for since it is the crowd that pays, it is proper to speak to it stupidly in order to please. (Gilbert, 542)

So what is this popular kind of mixed drama with a double plot that Castelvetro, Cinthio, and Lope de Vega all agree is required by their modern audiences? It approximates to the genre reviled by Aristotle as an inferior popular type, and called by Guarini "tragedy with a happy ending." Lope expands on the character of this variant:

The tragic mixed with the comic, Terence with Seneca, although it be like another monster of Pasiphae, will make one part grave, the other absurd: and this variety gives much delight. Nature gives a good example, for because of such variety it has beauty. (Gilbert, 544)

Like the drama of many of his contemporaries in the English theatre, Shakespeare's art in general can best be understood by these terms of reference provided by such sources, familiar to him and his European contemporaries, since almost all his plays approximate to some degree to what has often been called "tragicomedy," a term that first appeared as early as the prologue to the Amphitryon of Plautus. Its attributes are based exclusively on expedient stage practices, not aesthetic theories, and the precedents do not apply just to Shakespeare's comedies and romances, with their distinctive mixture of acute stress, comic wit, farce, and provocative resolutions. The frequent failure of some of his plays to match the specifications of academic theories of comedy and tragedy has led to the creation of a dubious academic category of indefinables called "problem plays." These often also include tragedies such as Hamlet and Julius Caesar , for their failure to conform to Aristotelian norms means that many of Shakespeare's tragedies must be relegated to the same anomalous group, unless we can show that they have their own distinct characteristics. If Shakespearean tragedies have detectable patterns, they are ones which were governed primarily by what theatre audiences welcomed, not by respect for supercilious authorities such as Sidney, who despised the contemporary Elizabethan popular theatre, and whose opinions were thus largely irrelevant to its practices. Elizabethan plays' structure, characterization, tone, and emotional impact are defined primarily by recurring responses to performances from their popular audiences. So it is not just in his comedies that Shakespeare avoided presenting spectators with painfully "correct" art, offering audiences instead What You Will , or As You Like It . We should distinguish between the productions of "play-writers" such as Ben Jonson whose artistic principles seem to be favored by intellectuals like Hamlet, and the practical craftsmanship of traditional "playwrights." Like Lope de Vega, it is to this latter category that Shakespeare primarily belongs, as a craftsman, like a wheelwright or a shipwright, designing works purely for the satisfaction and convenience of his customers, not to meet some supposedly superior standard of excellence, whether aesthetic or metaphysical, such as those promulgated by Renaissance Academies. A carpenter makes a chair from readily accessible materials for its immediate purchaser to sit in comfortably, not for it to be included in some posthumous anthology of Collected Chairs. We shall see this process reflected in many subsequent sections of this site. © HMR References Gilbert, Allan H., ed. 1962. Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.

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Shakespeare Studies & Criticism

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Welcome to the home of Shakespeare Studies & Criticism on Oxford Academic. We hope you will enjoy this celebration of Shakespeare, and that this page will act as a springboard to new discoveries on your research journey.

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Shakespeare on the oupblog.

Written in the stars: Prince Hal’s almanac

Marissa Nicosia

Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says th’almanac to that?

Marissa Nicosia explores the role of the almanac as a measure of time in Shakespeare’s Henry IV , and the parallels between a past and present-day fascination with astrology.

Sir Stanley Wells and the First Folio

It’s often been difficult to dispel this reverence and distinguish an actual author behind it.

For enabling many readers to accomplish that, we have to thank Sir Stanley Wells, general editor of The Oxford Shakespeare and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University. His diligent and common-sense scholarship has done much to de-mystify Shakespeare and reposition the plays as working documents.

OUP Archivist Martin Maw examines one scholar’s immense contribution to Shakespeare Studies.

“A tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”: Shakespeare under attack

Robert Stagg 

Around three years into his career as a dramatist, Shakespeare’s blank verse, came under attack.  

In 1592, playwright Robert Greene described William Shakespeare’s blank verse—his unrhymed iambic pentameter—as "bombastic".

Robert Stagg explores this criticism and how Shakespeare came to fend it off over the course of his career.

Why “the all-male stage” wasn’t

Pamela Allen Brown 

Why is “the all-male stage” inadequate as shorthand for the early modern stage?

Pamela Allen Brown explores gender roles on stage, and the arrival and impact of the 'innamorata accesa' (woman inflamed with passion), the trademark of the foreign diva.

How did Shakespeare become a London playwright?

Lena Cowen Orlin

Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, wrote in 1709 that the author married “while he was yet very young.” He then fell in with a bad crowd that “made a frequent practice of deer-stealing” from Warwickshire magnate Sir Thomas Lucy.

Lena Cowen Orlin traces the key events that took the playwright from Stratford to London.

Shakespeare and the sciences of emotion

Benedict S. Robinson

What role should literature have in the interdisciplinary study of emotion? The dominant answer today seems to be “not much.”

Using Shakespeare's Hamlet , Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Mind and Aristotle's Rhetoric ’ as points of departure, Benedict S. Robinson takes a wide view of emotion and "passion" to think about how passion also shaped the rise of new empirical sciences of the mind between 1600 and 1800.

Adapting Shakespeare: shattering stereotypes of Asian women onstage and onscreen

Alexa Alice Joubin

“I should like to see Miss Wong playing Shakespeare. Why not a Chinese Ophelia?”

Alexa Alice Joubin explores the perceptions and portrayal of Ophelia by Asian actors, arguing that gender roles in Shakespeare’s plays take on new meanings when they are embodied by Asian women.

Cut out characters and cracky plots: Jacob’s Room as Shakespeare play

Emily Kopley

But there is another reason, a reason outside of the novel, that Jacob is unknowable. He is the hero of a Shakespeare play.

Emily Kopley analyses Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room as a Shakespeare play, using letters between her and her brother Thoby, as an insight into the novel.

Early Modern Literary Geographies

Influenced by the work of cultural and human geographers, literary scholars have started to attend to the ways in which early modern people constructed their senses of the world out of interactions among places, spaces, and embodied practices. Early Modern Literary Geographies features innovative and agenda-setting research monographs that partake of this spatial turn.

Series Editors: Julie Sanders and Garrett Sullivan

Oxford Shakespeare Topics

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject.

General Editors: Stanley Wells, Peter Holland, and Lena Cowen Orlin

Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures

These Lectures are derived from the series of biennial lectures established in 2008 in honour of Professor Stanley Wells. The inaugural lectures were given by Professor David Scott Kastan and since then a series of highly respected scholars have presented and published in this series.

New Oxford Shakespeare

The New Oxford Shakespeare presents an entirely new consideration of all of Shakespeare's works, edited from first principles from the base-texts themselves, and drawing on the latest textual and theatrical scholarship.

The three interconnected print publications and the online edition have been created by an international, intergenerational team of scholars. The project's scope, depth, and vision provide the perfect platform for the future of Shakespeare studies.

Edited by: Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race

Edited by Patricia Akhimie

Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom.

Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

Edited by Christopher R. Wilson and Mervyn Cooke

With global coverage and an extensive survey of genres embracing music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music.

The Handbook showcases the latest international research into the captivating and vast subject of the many uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, extending from the Bard's own time to the present day.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

Edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw

A concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image.

From narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theatre adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms this Handbook explores the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

Edited by Valerie Traub

Extending the purview of feminist criticism, over 40 chapters offer an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion.

Theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Shakespeare Quarterly | Submit your research  

Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ)  is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies, publishing highly original, rigorously researched essays, notes, and book reviews. Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Oxford University Press, SQ is peer-reviewed and extremely selective.

Read our Author Guidelines to find out how to submit your work

Shakespeare’s Reading

Sir Stanley Wells, CBE, describes the many different sources Shakespeare drew upon in his work. Highlighting comparison passages, Wells explores Shakespeare’s relationship with the different texts he read throughout his life.

Shakespeare and Women

Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, discusses Shakespeare’s portrayal of the power balance between the sexes, women’s contribution to the Elizabethan stage, and Renaissance ideas about gender. She also considers key speeches by Desdemona and Emilia in Othello .

Shakespeare and Religion

Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson, Head of Research and Knowledge at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, explores the religious influences in Shakespeare’s work in the context of 16th century England - a time when the Church of England was given an established authority, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, and anti-Catholic laws were introduced.

Shakespeare and Sexuality

Sir Stanley Wells, CBE, analyses the references to sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. From his earlier comedies, such as The Two Gentleman of Verona or Much Ado About Nothing , where he is unafraid to play with this topic, to his middle and last texts where he demonstrates a deeper preoccupation with the destructive potential of sexual desire.

Shakespeare and Death

Laurie Maguire, Emeritus Professor, Magdalen College Oxford discusses the theme of death in Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. She considers how Elizabethans encountered death on a daily basis, and how Shakespeare was clearly very familiar with the details of death, and murder.

Shakespeare and Music

Joseph M. Ortiz, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso, explains how music was experienced and understood in Shakespeare’s time, with reference to education, the emerging music publishing industry, conflicting religious views, audiences’ expectations, and music as an instrument of political power.

Shakespeare and Race

Ayanna Thompson considers the theme of race in Shakespeare’s plays, the extent to which he would have been aware of Africans, and how he introduced them into his plays. She discusses the current debate amongst black actors about whether or not to play the part of Othello .

Shakespeare and His Collaborators

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Shakespeare's Staging

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Hamlet has a uniquely rich and complex stage history reflecting the fascination which the principal character has aroused in every kind of critic, partly because the exceptional use of his soliloquies draws compelling attention to his elusive subjective identity. The ambiguities of the hero and the plot have opened infinite interpretative options, and it is possible that this diversity provides a challenge deliberately created by the playwright to incite audience interest. After all, like the Oedipus of Sophocles, this play has elements of one of the great literary forms: the detective story. It appears that a major crime has been committed in the state which the hero is compelled to investigate, but in the process he finds that his own integrity is severely challenged by his own involvement in homicide. The recurring uncertainty of proving concealed guilt and of responding to what is uncovered may well be the real subject of both plays, and might be more stressed as a major concern of the play. The play's multiple structure invites this view, since it presents no fewer than four children losing fathers through violence, each responding in significantly different ways: Ophelia by losing her sanity in suicide, Laertes by pursuing injudicious violence against others, and only Fortinbras ultimately surviving to achieve his goals without further crime. One possible production option may be not to surrender entirely to the hero's point of view, but to recognize and enjoy the script's fascinating shifts of tone and situation, while recognizing in the end that, if Hamlet is killed, by that point he has achieved some greater awareness of a less hectic and distraught response to life's vicissitudes than he began with.

Aasand, Hardin L., ed. Stage Directions in Hamlet. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.

Alkire, N. L. "Subliminal Masks in Olivier's Hamlet ." Shakespeare On Film Newsletter 16 (1991): 1, 5.

Bailey, Helen Phelps. "Hamlet" In France: From Voltaire to Laforgue . Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1964.

Barber, Frances. "Ophelia." In Players of Shakespeare , vol. 2, edited by Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood, 137-49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Barrie, Robert. "Telmahs: Carnival Laughter in Hamlet ." In New Essays on Hamlet , edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, 83-100. Hamlet Collection 1. New York: AMS, 1994.

BBC Archive: Talking Hamlet | Actors discuss playing Shakespeare's Dane

Berry, Ralph. "Hamlet and the Audience: The Dynamics of a Relationship." In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance: Essays in the Tradition of Performance Criticism in Honor of Bernard Beckerma, edited by Marvin Thompson and Ruth Thompson, 24-28. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989.

Bertram, Paul, and Bernice Kliman, eds. The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Secdond Quartos and the First Folio . New York: AMS Press, 1991.

Billigheimer, Rachel V. "Diversity in the Hamlets of the Eighteenth Century Stage in England, France and Germany." Hamlet Studies: An International Journal of Research on 'The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke' 11, nos. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 1989): 34-48.

Billington, Michael. "From Time Lord to antic prince: David Tennant is the best Hamlet in years." Review of Hamlet , with David Tennant, Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard, Stratford-Upon-Avon, 2008. The Guardian , London, August 6, 2008.

Bowers, Rick. "Cooke's Hamlet in Performance, 1785." Dalhousie Review 82 (2002-3): 347-63.

Breight, Curtis. "Branagh and the Prince, or 'The Royal Fellowship of Death.'" In Shakespeare on Film: A Casebook , edited by Robert Shaughnessy, 126-44. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

The Broken Ruler: 'A' Level Shakespeare Study Site

Brooks, Jean R. "Hamlet and Ophelia as Lovers: Some Interpretations on Page and Stage." Aligorh Critical Miscellany 4, no. 1 (1991): 1-25.

Brown, John Russell. "Multiplicity of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet ." Connotations 2 (1992): 16-33.

Buhler, Stephen. "Double Takes: Branaugh Gets to Hamlet. " Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 17, no. 1 (1997): 43-52.

Buell, William Ackerman. The Hamlets of the Theatre . New York: Astor-Honor, 1968.

Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Burnett, Mark Thornton. "The 'Very Cunning of the Scene': Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet ." Literature Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1997): 78-82.

Campbell, Kathleen. "Zeffirelli's Hamlet —Q1 in Performance." Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 16, no. 1 (1991): 7-8.

Canaris, Volker. "Peter Zadek and Hamlet ." Drama Review 24, no. 1 (March 1980): 53-62.

Charney, Maurice. "Analogy and Infinite Regress in Hamlet." In Psychoanalytic Approaches to Lit and Film, edited by M. Charney, 156-67. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson Press, 1987.

Charney, Maurice. "Asides, Soliloquies, and Offstage Speech in Hamlet: Implications for Staging." In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance: Essays in the Tradition of Performance Criticism in Honor of Bernard Beckerman, edited by Marvin Thompson and Ruth Thompson, 116-31. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989.

Charney, Maurice. " Hamlet without Words." ELH 32 (1965): 457-77.

Church, Tony. "Polonius in Hamlet ." In Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company , edited by Philip Brockbank, 103-14. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Coursen, Herbert. "A German Hamlet ." Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 11, no. 1 (1986): 4.

Cross, Brenda, ed. The Film "Hamlet": A Record of its Production . London: Saturn Press, 1948.

Davison, Richard Allan. "The Readiness Was All: Ian Charleson and Richard Eyre's Hamlet ." In Shakespeare: Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio , edited by Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, 170-82. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999.

Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet. Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Dent, Alan, ed. "Hamlet": The Film and the Play . London: World Film Publications, 1948.

Duffy, Robert A. "Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation." Literature / Film Quarterly 4 (1976): 141-52.

Edwards, Philip, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . New Cambridge Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Ehrlich, Jeremy. "The Search for the Hamlet 'Director's Cut.'" English Studies 83 (2002): 399-406.

Furness, H. H. "The Hamlet of John Barrymore." The Drama (March 1923): 207-8, 230.

Furness, H. H., ed. Hamlet . Variorum Edition, 2 volumes. London; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1905

Gay, Jane de. "Playing (with) Shakespeare: Bryony Lavery's Ophelia and Jane Prendergast's I, Hamlet ." New Theatre Quarterly 14 (1998): 125-38.

Gianakaris, C. J. "Stoppard's Adaptations of Shakespeare: Dogg's Hamlet , Cahoot's Macbeth ." Comparative Drama 18 (1984-85): 222-40.

Gibinska, Marta, and Jerzy Limon, eds. Hamlet: East-West. Gdansk: Theatrum Gedanense Foundation, 1998.

Gilder, Rosamond. John Gielgud's Hamlet: A Record of Performance; With Notes on Costume, Scenery, and Stage Business by John Gielgud. New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1937.

Glick, Claris. " Hamlet in the English Theater—Acting Texts from Betterton (1676) to Olivier (1963)." Shakespeare Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1969): 17-35.

Golder, John. " Hamlet in France 200 Years Ago." Shakespeare Survey 24 (1971): 79-86.

Goldman, Michael. " Hamlet : Entering the Text." Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 449-60.

Gorfain, Phyllis. "Toward a Theory of Play and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet ." Hamlet Studies 13 (1991): 25-49. [Reprinted in Donald Keesey, Contexts for Criticism (1994) and in Ronald Knowles, Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (1998).]

Gregory, Michael. "Hamlet's Voice: Aspects of Text Formation and Cohesion in a Soliloquy." Forum Linguisticum 7 (December 1982): 107-22.

Guntner, Lawrence. "Expressionist Shakespeare: The Gade/Nielsen Hamlet (1920) and the History of Shakespeare on Film." Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 17, no. 2 (Winter-Spring 1998): 90-102.

Guthrie, Tyrone. " Hamlet at Elsinore." London Mercury 213 (July 1937): 246-9.

Halio, Jay. "Three Filmed Hamlets ." Literature Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 316-20.

Halverson, John. "The Importance of Horatio." Hamlet Studies 16 (1994): 57-70.

Hansen, Niels Bugge. "Be As Ourself in Denmark: Hamlet in Performance at Kronborg Castle, Elsinore." Angles on the English-Speaking World 10 (1997): 5-16.

Hapgood, Robert, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Shakespeare in Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hardesty, Susan M. "David Garrick's Adaptation of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ." Gypsy Scholar: A Graduate Forum for Literary Criticism 6 (1979): 93-100.

Hassall, Anthony J. "Fielding and Garrick's Hamlet ." Studies in the Eighteenth Century 4 (1979): 147-65.

Hibbard, George, ed. Hamlet . Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Holland, Peter. " Hamlet and the Art of Acting." In Drama and the Actor , edited by James Redmond, 39-61. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Holland, Peter. " Hamlet : Text in Performance." In Hamlet , edited by Peter J. Smith and Nigel Wood, 55-82. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996.

Hu, John. "Adapting Shakespearean Plays into the Chinese Opera: Pitfalls as Exemplified by Hamlet ." Studies in Language and Literature 5 (October 1992): 95-104.

Impastato, David. "Zeffirelli's Hamlet : Sunlight Makes Meaning." Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 16 (1991): 1-2.

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--> directory O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise. , 3.2) Most of the poorer audience members, referred to as groundlings, would pay one penny (which was almost an entire day's wage) to stand in front of the stage, while the richer patrons would sit in the covered galleries, paying as much as half a crown each for their seats. In 1599, Thomas Platter, a Swiss doctor visiting London from Basel, reported the cost of admission in his diary: "[There are] separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a farther door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen then he gives yet another English penny at another door. And in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost." ( ) Shakespeare's audience would have been composed of tanners, butchers, iron-workers, millers, seamen from the ships docked in the Thames, glovers, servants, shopkeepers, wig-makers, bakers, and countless other tradesmen and their families. Ben Jonson commented on the diversity of the playgoers in his verses praising Fletcher's : ) Shakespeare's audience was far more boisterous than are patrons of the theatre today. They were loud and hot-tempered and as interested in the happenings off stage as on. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries noted that "you will see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women, such care for their garments that they be not trod on . . . such toying, such smiling, such winking, such manning them home ... that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour" (Stephen Gosson, , 1579). The nasty hecklers and gangs of riffraff would come from seedy parts in and around London like Tower-hill and Limehouse and Shakespeare made sure to point them out: , 5.4.65-8) Mabillard, Amanda. . . 20 Aug. 2000. (date when you accessed the information) As they like it: Shakespeare in Russia As Shakespeare's Globe takes its Hamlet world tour to Moscow, Andrew Dickson examines Russia's complicated love affair with the Bard Early this May, when a troupe of British actors step off a plane in Moscow, a modest piece of history will have been made. It will be the first time Shakespeare’s Globe in London has brought a show to Russia – a pitstop on the theatre’s adventurous Globe to Globe tour , in which the company attempts to take Hamlet to every single country in the world between now and 2016. It will also mark the start of the first UK–Russia year of culture, in which Kazimir Malevich and cosmonauts will come to London while, courtesy of the Barbican’s Designing 007 exhibition, James Bond goes to Russia (travelling, for once, on official papers). The Globe’s visit, like Bond’s, is a landmark. But as they stroll around Moscow in their two precious days there, the actors would do well to remember that their house playwright got there long in advance. He has, in fact, been in Russia for centuries, mingling with the locals and learning the language. These days, you could argue, he almost counts as a native. Midsummer Night’s Dream As You Like It, directed by Dmitry Krymov, will be returning to London’s Barbican in November Shakespeare himself seems to have been a unadventurous traveller, to put it mildly: to the best of our knowledge, he spent his entire life in Stratford-upon-Avon, in London or on the road between the two. But his imagination roamed far and wide. He set plays in Austria, Scotland, Denmark, Turkey and in the Ardennes forest on the Belgium–Luxembourg border. He seems to have had a thing about Italy (Venice, Verona, Padua) and about islands: Sicily is the setting for Much Ado about Nothing , most of Othello takes place on Cyprus, while The Tempes t has its own nameless “isle”, half-based on the islands of Bermuda but ingeniously relocated to the Mediterranean. Another destination his mind’s eye reached was Russia: as well as scattered references in other plays, Shakespeare’s early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost has a curious scene in which three French lords dress up as “Muscovites” in order to woo three French ladies. This is usually the cue for directors to break out the comedy beards and fake-fur hats — the lords make fools of themselves — but given that ambassadors from Ivan the Terrible really did make appearances at Elizabeth I’s court, the reference is pointed, not to say undiplomatic. “Tolstoy’s essay ‘Shakespeare and Drama’ rails against everything from the implausibility of Shakespeare’s characters to his supposed aristocratic sympathies” Even before his death in 1616, Shakespeare’s plays were being toured up the Baltic coast by hardy troupes of English actors, who, by the 1640s, got as far north as Riga. But it wasn’t for another century that the so-called father of Russian drama, Alexander Sumarokov, translated a play by a man he called the “inspired barbarian”, in whose work, he wrote, “there is much that is bad and exceedingly good”. Sumarokov’s view of Shakespeare as an accidental genius — a kind of holy fool — says more about Sumarokov than it does about Shakespeare. But his view persisted in Russia through the early nineteenth century, as the theatre-going Russians struggled to reconcile their taste for neoclassical drama imported from France, home of all that was civilised, with Shakespeare’s more lawless and ungovernable plays. Catherine the Great was an early translator of Shakespeare into Russian. Portrait by Mikhail Shibanov (1787) That said, his reputation was enhanced in 1786 when none other than Catherine the Great , an avid reader of Shakespeare in French, adapted The Merry Wives of Windsor and, soon afterwards, the little-performed tragedy Timon of Athens — possibly the only time that a serving head of state has moonlighted as a Shakespeare translator. Inspired by a Romantic obsession with the Bard that began in Germany, translations began to pour from Russian presses from the 1840s. These translations fired the imagination of generations: literary critic Vissarion Belinsky admitted to being “enslaved by the drama of Shakespeare”; the great poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin drew heavily on Hamlet , as well as the history plays, for his drama of kingship and conscience Boris Godunov ; novelist Ivan Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons, wrote numerous stories on Shakespearian themes , as well as a famous essay on “Hamlet and Don Quixote”; Fyodor Dostoevsky was hugely influenced by Macbeth in particular, with Crime and Punishment revisiting the themes of murder and guilt. Tolstoy, however, was, notoriously, not a fan: his 1906 essay “Shakespeare and Drama” rails against everything from the implausibility of Shakespeare’s characters to his supposed aristocratic sympathies. “Critics attempted to align Shakes with Marxist-Leninist thought, resourcefully interpreting the pastoral comedy As You Like It as a critique of land privatisation” Though Russian literature was by now heavily saturated by his influence, it took longer for Shakespeare to find a home in Russian theatre. Hamlet was one of the first plays to be performed, in the mid-nineteenth century (there are stories about serfs adapting the tragedy and performing it for their masters), while stars from Europe and further afield brought Shakespeare’s scripts to Russian audiences. One of the greatest was the African-American actor Ira Aldridge , who, unable to perform in his homeland, became a huge star in Russia, playing roles including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Othello in the 1850s, when he was decorated by Tsar Alexander II. Shakespeare was also an inspiration to Russian composers, most of all Pyotr Tchaikovsky, whose Fantasy Overture to Romeo and Juliet (1880) transforms the play into a passionate and lovelorn symphonic poem. In the communist era Shakespeare’s status was hotly debated, but — in death as in life — he proved impressively adaptable to the winds of ideological change. Critics attempted to align him with Marxist-Leninist thought, resourcefully interpreting the pastoral comedy As You Like It as a critique of land privatisation and Timon of Athens, whose hero goes bust in spectacular fashion, as an attack on unfettered capitalism (Marx had written approvingly about Timon’s denunciation of the “yellow slave” — gold). American Shakesperean actor Ira Aldridge found fame in Russia. Portrait as Othello, by James Northcote (1826) Ironically, however, because Shakespeare’s work was officially sanctioned, it also became the conduit via which dissidents could voice criticism. Anna Akhmatova read his plays and poems intensively and Boris Pasternak, unable to publish his own work after Stalin began his purges, turned to Shakespeare as a way of keeping himself sane. Pasternak translated the sonnets and a number of plays, but his masterpieces are undoubtedly his muscular versions of King Lear and Hamlet , both completed in the 1940s. The latter in particular seems to have been a creative lifeline: Pasternak called it “a drama of high calling, of a pre-ordained heroic death, of entrusted destiny”, words that eerily mirror his own struggle for creative freedom. That struggle was echoed across the Soviet Union, where the plays — by now translated into 28 of the languages of the USSR — were intermittently staged as critiques of official policy right up to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989, particularly in Georgia. Pasternak’s translations are responsible for one of the great glories of Russian Shakespeare, two films by Grigori Kozintsev that use them as screenplays. Disdaining the post-Romantic tradition of interpreting the play psychologically, Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) offers a brutal exercise in realpolitik, in which legendary Soviet actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky is trapped in a court whose machinations he cannot begin to comprehend. (Smotkunovsky was no stranger to brutal realpolitik: wespite winning medals for gallantry during the Second World War, time as a prisoner of war in Germany meant that he was barred from living in major cities and had to hone his craft on the provincial stage.) Kozintsev’s Lear (1971) is an even bleaker experience: the king, played by the diminutive Estonian actor Jüri Järvet, is expelled into a wilderness both literal and political, the erosion of his sanity shadowed by Dmitry Shostakovich’s angular and half-deranged score. Both films are among the finest adaptations captured on celluloid, in any language. Shakespeare’s presence in contemporary Russia seems stronger than ever: in the hands of visionary directors such as St Petersburg’s Lev Dodin and Moscow’s Kirill Serebrennikov, the plays are constantly reimagined, and they are in the core repertoire of theatres across the Russian Federation, staged as frequently as firm favourites like Anton Chekhov and Alexander Ostrovsky. Later this summer, audiences back in Britain will even have the opportunity to get a taste of Russian Shakespeare for themselves. In mid-June, not long after the Globe actors pause in Moscow, quixotic director Dmitry Krymov brings his gleefully anarchic mash-up of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to London’s Barbican . Krymov’s version offers audiences an opera singer, acrobats and puppets, plus the near-certainty of getting soaked. You could say it offers something even more valuable, too: the opportunity to see the “inspired barbarian” in the original Russian. Blurred lines: Russian literature and cultural diversity in Ukraine Fragile beauty: an exclusive extract from Slava Mogutin’s new book Man of letters: Oleg Pavlov is leading a literary renaissance. Don’t ask him to be happy about it Meet cute: Dostoevsky goes to the movies in The Double It’s Not Time to Give Up on Shakespeare—Yet "I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition," wrote a teacher in the Washington Post in 2015—referring, of course, to none other than William Shakespeare. The following year, students at Yale University petitioned to “decolonize” the literary canon demanding that pre-1800/1900 courses encompass a study of “literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” Around the same time, students at the University of Pennsylvania removed a portrait of Shakespeare replacing it with a printed photo of Audre Lorde the Black Feminist poet and novelist in order to protest the overemphasis in English degrees on white male authors What these protests reveal is that the elite exceptionalism that has been built, with Shakespeare as its talisman, can feel oppressive. Because Shakespeare has been the centre of attention for centuries, writers who tell stories about communities other than those of the dominant culture must be found in and extracted from the shadow of the great white Bard, the ancient word for a great poet, applied to Shakespeare 150 years after he died, the work of whom has, for some, grown increasingly irrelevant. The institutionalization of Shakespeare in schools, universities, and theatre, has traditionally meant centering a white, male perspective and preaching that it speaks for everyone; in other words, making it “universal.”  The historical use of Shakespeare as a vehicle for moral and civil education stretches this “universal” perspective into something akin to a straitjacket.  Shakespeare’s universality has been upheld as a positive force. At the turn of the 21st century, famed literary critic Harold Bloom unashamedly championed Shakespeare’s universalism, going so far as to claim that Shakespeare “invented humanity” as we know it. Such commentary hearkens back to exorbitant praise of the playwright, which poured forth in the 18th century—from literary critics, poets, actors, philosophers, and even artists. It was in this century of “Enlightenment” in England when Shakespeare was finally boosted up on to his towering plinth and from where he has remained ever since. Branding Shakespeare a “native genius,” “god of all our idolatry,” and identifying his English roots as the source of his exceptionalism became crucial endeavors in the 18th century—a time when the slave trade and maritime conquest was making the newly United Kingdom one of the world’s wealthiest powers. More From TIME With fortune came high culture and the myth of Shakespeare was placed securely at the apex. His identity as a man of theatre became extracted from his work, and he emerged the literary Goliath of the sacred Western canon. This image of Shakespeare as an Anglo-Saxon paragon of masculinity, humanity, and creativity was gladly transported from England to America in the 18th and 19th centuries. But this Shakespeare is bound up with the colonial project and has yet to be properly untangled from it. His so-called “universality,” combined with the insistence that we continue to learn from his 400-year-old benign wisdom in our complex modern moment, is beginning to look unstable. So, do we pull him down from his pedestal and say time’s up? My answer is yes. Sort of. The truth is that there are really two Shakespeares. The first is the real Shakespeare of 16th century London, a a commercially-minded, jobbing playwright who worked closely with a company of actors. Simply put, they needed his work to be popular and marketable. The collected works of Shakespeare, his First Folio , was not published until seven years after he died, which means he was not part of an esteemed literary canon when he was alive. Playwrighting was scrappy back then, the texts fragmented, messy, showing signs of collaboration and intervention, sometimes by royal censors. What emerged though are glorious stories, sublime poetry, and characters that are miraculously true to life—once the plays were gathered and sold as works, Shakespeare started to gain traction as a literary giant. By the end of the 18th century, he was properly deified. Read More : Here Are Shakespeare's 15 Most Beloved Quotes The second Shakespeare was the 18th century mascot for English white supremacy. He is also the Shakespeare that is still with us. This is why teachers are struggling to sell him to an increasingly fed-up student body—the traditional curriculum doesn’t allow for much deviation from bardoltry. As Director of Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, I am sometimes asked why we still “push” Shakespeare on to young people and university students when he is "no longer relevant." What on earth could a 400-year-old author possibly have to say to a 21st-century teenager? Quite a lot. Shakespeare hailed from the early modern era, when many of the ideologies, political, and social systems we are familiar with in the modern world were forming, including ideas about nature, race, gender, and class. The plays express concern for the destruction of the natural world at the cost of human life. Shakespeare writes with unimpeded curiosity and imagination about people who are “othered” in society, about Black, indigenous, and Jewish lives. For example, his first Black character, Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus who appears a few years before Othello , speaks boldly in defence of Blackness : “Coal-black is better than another hue/In that it scorns to bear another hue.” Yet we must contend with moments in his comedies of racist humour (“She’s too brown for a fair praise,” for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing ) and misogyny ( The Taming of the Shrew ). Is it Shakespeare or simply his era that offends? His female characters are not one-dimensional dolls though, but complex women, sometimes complex women of color, like the “tawny Queen” Cleopatra. Yet, at the time, professional theatre companies did not cast any women; instead, young male actors performed the female parts, making cross-dressing a crucial feature of theatre and tantalizing the imagination with queer identities and actors in drag. As a result, the plays raise questions about the very instability of gender identity and the glory of its performance. The contemporary relevance of Shakespeare is starting to catch on. Ironically, some of Shakespeare’s plays are now banned in Florida because of the cross-dressing, gender-switching characters. What more evidence do we need, once we see beyond the 18th-century fantasy, that Shakespeare can be of immense use to our own urgent political and social questioning? More Must-Reads from TIME Breaking Down the 2024 Election Calendar How Ukraine Beat Russia in the Battle of the Black Sea The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris Long COVID Looks Different in Kids What a $129 Frying Pan Says About America’s Eating Habits The 1 Heart-Health Habit You Should Start When You’re Young Cuddling Might Help You Get Better Sleep The 50 Best Romance Novels to Read Right Now Contact us at [email protected] What Shakespeare can teach us about racism Associate Professor of English, Trinity College Disclosure statement David S. Brown receives funding from Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies. Trinity College provides funding as a member of The Conversation US. View all partners William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy “ Othello ” is often the first play that comes to mind when people think of Shakespeare and race . And if not “Othello,” then folks usually name “ The Merchant of Venice ,” “ Antony and Cleopatra ,” “ The Tempest ,” or his first – and bloodiest – tragedy, “ Titus Andronicus ,” my favorite Shakespeare play. Among Shakespeare scholars, those five works are known as his traditionally understood “race plays” and include characters who are Black like Othello, Jewish like Shylock, Indigenous like Caliban, or Black African like Cleopatra. But what did Shakespeare have to say about race in plays such as “ Hamlet ” and “ Macbeth ,” where Black characters do not have a dominant role, for example? As Shakespeare scholars who study race know, all of his plays address race in some way. How could they not? After all, every human being has a racial identity, much like every living human being breathes. Said another way, every character Shakespeare breathed life into has a racial identity, from Hamlet to Hippolyta . The playwright wrote about many key subjects during the late 15th and early 16th centuries that are relevant today, including gender, addiction, sexuality, mental health, social psychology, sexual violence , antisemitism, sexism and, of course, race . In my book “ Shakespeare’s White Others ,” I explore the intraracial divisions that Shakespeare illustrates in all his plays. Here are four things to know about Shakespeare and race. 1. No one should fear Shakespeare For a long time, I was afraid of Shakespeare. I am not the only one. In his 1964 essay “ Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare ,” James Baldwin detailed his initial resistance. Like many people today, Baldwin wrote that he, too, was “a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare.” A major part of Baldwin’s loathing of Shakespeare had nothing to do with the English writer specifically, but rather the white elitism that surrounded his work and literature. But as Baldwin eventually realized, Shakespeare was not the “ author of his oppression .” Just as Shakespeare didn’t create misogyny and sexism, he didn’t create race and racism. Rather, he observed the complex realities of the world around him, and through his plays he articulated an underlying hope for a more just world. 2. Shakespeare’s work reveals social injustice “ Titus Andronicus ” featured the playwright’s first Black character, Aaron. In that play, written near the end of the 16th century, the white Roman empress, Tamora, cheats on her white emperor husband, Saturninus, with Aaron. When Tamora eventually gives birth to a baby, it’s clear Tamora’s baby daddy isn’t Saturninus. Consequently, the white characters who know about the infant’s real father urge Aaron to kill his newborn Black son. But Aaron refuses. He opts instead to fiercely protect his beloved child. Amid all the drama that occurs around the child’s existence, Shakespeare momentarily offers a beautiful defense of Blackness in the play’s fourth act. “Is black so base a hue?” Aaron initially asks before challenging the cultural norm. “Coal-black is better than another hue, in that it scorns to bear another hue.” In other words, at least to Aaron, being Black was beautiful, Blackness exuded strength. Such words about the Black identity are not uttered elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays – not even by the more popular Othello . 3. The power of whiteness In plays such as “ Hamlet ,” “Macbeth” and “ Romeo and Juliet ,” race still figures in the drama even when there are no dominant Black characters. Shakespeare does this by illustrating the formation and maintenance of the white identity. In a sense, Shakespeare details the nuances of race through his characters’ racial similarities, thus making racial whiteness very visible. In Shakespeare’s time, much like our present moment, the presumed superiority of whiteness meant social status was negotiated by everyone based on the dominant culture’s standards. In several of his plays, for instance, the playwright uses “white hands” as noble symbols of purity and white superiority. He also called attention to his character’s race by describing them as “white” or “fair.” Shakespeare also used black as a metaphor for being tainted. One such moment occurs in the comedy “ Much Ado About Nothing .” A young white woman, Hero, is falsely accused of cheating on her fiancé. On their wedding day, Hero’s groom, Claudio, charges her with being unfaithful. Claudio and Hero’s father, Leonato, then shame Hero for being allegedly unchaste, a no-no for 16th-century English women who were legally their father’s and then their husband’s property. With Hero’s sexual purity allegedly tainted, her father describes her as having “fallen into a pit of ink.” Sex before marriage violated the male-dominated culture’s expectations for unwed white women. Thus, in that play, Hero momentarily represents an “inked” white woman – or a symbolic reflection of the stereotyped, hypersexual Black woman. 4. The future of scholarship on Shakespeare and race Today, scholars are publishing new insights on the social, cultural and political issues of Shakespeare’s time and our own. In fact, there are dozens of scholars and theater practitioners devoting their professional lives to exploring race in Shakespeare’s literature and time period. In his 2000 book “ Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice ,” UCLA English professor Arthur L. Little Jr. explored British imperialism, racialized whiteness and the sexual myths about Black men. In 2020, playwright Anchuli Felicia King wrote “ Keene ,” a satirical riff on “Othello” that offers a modern-day critique on whiteness. In “Keene,” Kai, a Japanese musicologist, and Tyler, a Black Ph.D. student, meet at a Shakespeare conference where they are the only two people of color at the elite white gathering. While Tyler is focused on writing his thesis, Kai is focused on Tyler. A romance ensues, only to see Tyler – much like Othello before him – betrayed by his closet white confidant, Ian. In 2019, British actress Adjoa Andoh directed Shakespeare’s “ Richard II ” with a cast of all women of color – a production that she called “a thought experiment into the universality of humanity.” English literature Shakespeare Anti-Semitism James Baldwin Titus Andronicus Manager, Regional Training Hub Head of Evidence to Action Supply Chain - Assistant/Associate Professor (Tenure-Track) OzGrav Postdoctoral Research Fellow Casual Facilitator: GERRIC Student Programs - Arts, Design and Architecture Bahasa Indonesia Slovenščina Science & Tech Russian Kitchen Royal Shakespeare Company Rounds Out Cast for ‘Othello’ Led by John Douglas Thompson (EXCLUSIVE) By Naman Ramachandran Naman Ramachandran ‘Alien: Romulus’ Holds Off Challengers, Tops U.K. and Ireland Box Office for Second Week 13 hours ago Sony and Zee Reach Settlement, Ending Merger Disputes 18 hours ago Venice Horizons Competition Title ‘Pooja, Sir’ Unveils First Sales, Teaser (EXCLUSIVE) 18 hours ago The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has revealed the full ensemble for its upcoming production of “ Othello ,” completing a cast led by previously revealed headliners. The ensemble includes Al Barclay as Lodovico, Scott Brooksbank as Montano, Ricardo Castro as Messenger, and John Paul Connolly as the Duke of Venice. Also cast are Jason Eddy as Sailor, Kevin N. Golding as Clown, Edward Hogg as Cassio and Colin Hurley as Brabantio. Related Stories First Paramount, Now SiriusXM: Can Warren Buffett’s Media Investments Be Trusted? Punkie Johnson Explains Why She Is Leaving 'SNL': 'That Show Is for a Different Type of Person' Popular on variety. Tim Carroll, artistic director of Canada’s Shaw Festival, will direct the production. Carroll’s credits include productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III” at Shakespeare’s Globe and “The Merchant of Venice” for the RSC. The creative team features Judith Bowden (set and costume designer), Paule Constable (lighting designer), James Oxley (composer), Donato Wharton (sound designer), Alexis Milligan (movement director) and Kev McCurdy (fight director). Thompson, the production’s Othello, brings a wealth of experience from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional productions, including performances in “King Lear,” “Carousel” and “Jitney.” His screen work includes roles in “The Gilded Age,” “Mare of Easttown” and the film “Till.” Keen returns to the RSC after his previous performance in “Prince of Homburg.” Rylance, making her RSC debut, brings experience from productions at BAM, The Old Vic and Shakespeare’s Globe. Hille, an Olivier and BAFTA nominee, has previously appeared in the RSC’s “A Winter’s Tale.” The Shakespeare tragedy is set to run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from Oct. 11 to Nov. 23. 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It is a world-class theatre company whose influence has been felt throughout the world. MKhAT gave new direction to the development of world theatre arts and modern theatre as we know it. The theatre’s calling card, based on the company’s close collaboration with Anton Chekhov, is its famous seagull emblem on its building and the main curtain. The variety of names by which the theatre was known is as varied as its history is complex. The company changed its names several times... This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Access this chapter Institutional subscriptions Bulgakov, Mikhail. 1968. Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel . Translated by Michael Glenny. New York: Simon and Schuster. Google Scholar   Frame, Murray. 2008. Censorship and control in the Russian Imperial theatres during the 1905 revolution and its aftermath. Revolutionary Russia 7 (2): 164–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546549408575622 . Moskovsky khudozhestvennyj akademichesky teatr, in Bol’shaya Rossiyskaya Entsiklopedia , 2004. Smeliansky, Anatoly. 1999. The Russian Theatre after Stalin . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanislavsky, Konstantin. Moya zhizn’ v iskusstve (My Life in Art) . Russian edition of 1948. ———. 1974. My life in art . Translated and edited by Jean Benedetti. London, New York: Routledge. The official site of Chekhov MKhT. https://mxat.ru The official site of Gorky MKhAT. http://www.mxat-teatr.ru The official site of the MKhAT Museum. https://museummhat.ru/ Download references Author information Authors and affiliations. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Rima Greenhill You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to Rima Greenhill . Section Editor information Department of English, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Alexa Alice Joubin School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Ema Vyroubalova York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Elizabeth Pentland Rights and permissions Reprints and permissions Copyright information © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG About this entry Cite this entry. Greenhill, R. (2022). Moscow Art Theatre. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_124-1 Download citation DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99378-2_124-1 Received : 22 July 2022 Accepted : 11 August 2022 Published : 29 January 2023 Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham Print ISBN : 978-3-319-99378-2 Online ISBN : 978-3-319-99378-2 eBook Packages : Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media Studies Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Humanities Publish with us Policies and ethics Find a journal Track your research Website navigation Shakespeare's life. 19th-century portrait of Shakespeare with his family at home in Stratford William Shakespeare: A biography Since William Shakespeare lived more than 400 years ago, and many records from that time are lost or never existed in the first place, we don’t know everything about Shakespeare’s life. For example, we know that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, 100 miles northwest of London, on April 26, 1564. But we don’t know his exact birthdate, which must have been a few days earlier. We do know that Shakespeare’s life revolved around two locations: Stratford and London. He grew up, had a family, and bought property in Stratford, but he worked in London, the center of English theater. As an actor, a playwright, and a partner in a leading acting company, he became both prosperous and well-known. Even without knowing everything about his life, fans of Shakespeare have imagined and reimagined him according to their own tastes. Looking for more in-depth information? Need something you can cite? Read an essay about Shakespeare’s life from the Folger Shakespeare Editions. Read essay Primary sources Visit Shakespeare Documented to see primary-source materials documenting Shakespeare’s life. This online resource of items from the Folger and other institutions brings together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare and his works, as well as additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter. Early life: Birth and childhood William Shakespeare was probably born on about April 23, 1564, the date that is traditionally given for his birth. He was John and Mary Shakespeare’s oldest surviving child; their first two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy. Growing up as the big brother of the family, William had three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger sisters: Anne, who died at seven, and Joan. Their father, John Shakespeare, was a leatherworker who specialized in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar items. A prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden, of the prominent Arden family. John rose through local offices in Stratford, becoming an alderman and eventually, when William was five, the town bailiff—much like a mayor. Not long after that, however, John Shakespeare stepped back from public life; we don’t know why. Shakespeare, as the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost certainly attended Stratford’s grammar school. Like all such schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on the Latin classics, including memorization, writing, and acting classic Latin plays. Shakespeare most likely attended until about age 15. A horn book in the Folger collection, similar to one that Shakespeare might have learned to read from Marriage (to Anne Hathaway) and children A few years after he left school, in late 1582, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly common situation at the time. When they married, Anne was 26 and William was 18. Anne grew up just outside Stratford in the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of her life in Stratford. In early 1585, the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet, completing the family. In the years ahead, Anne and the children lived in Stratford while Shakespeare worked in London, although we don’t know when he moved there. Some later observers have suggested that this separation, and the couple’s relatively few children, were signs of a strained marriage, but we do not know that, either. Someone pursuing a theater career had no choice but to work in London, and many branches of the Shakespeares had small families. Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of 11. His older daughter Susanna later married a well-to-do Stratford doctor, John Hall. Their daughter Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s first grandchild, was born in 1608. In 1616, just months before his death, Shakespeare’s daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, a Stratford vintner. The family subsequently died out, leaving no direct descendants of Shakespeare. London theater For several years after the birth of Judith and Hamnet in 1585, nothing is known for certain of Shakespeare’s activities: how he earned a living, when he moved from Stratford, or how he got his start in the theater. Following this gap in the record, the first definite mention of Shakespeare is in 1592 as an established London actor and playwright, mocked by a contemporary as a “Shake-scene.” The same writer alludes to one of Shakespeare’s earliest history plays, Henry VI, Part 3 , which must already have been performed. The next year, in 1593, Shakespeare published a long poem, Venus and Adonis . The first quarto editions of his early plays appeared in 1594. For more than two decades, Shakespeare had multiple roles in the London theater as an actor, playwright, and, in time, a business partner in a major acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men in 1603). Over the years, he became steadily more famous in the London theater world; his name, which was not even listed on the first quartos of his plays, became a regular feature—clearly a selling point—on later title pages. Final years and death Shakespeare prospered financially from his partnership in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), as well as from his writing and acting. He invested much of his wealth in real-estate purchases in Stratford and bought the second-largest house in town, New Place, in 1597. Among the last plays that Shakespeare worked on was The Two Noble Kinsmen , which he wrote with a frequent collaborator, John Fletcher, most likely in 1613. He died on April 23, 1616—the traditional date of his birthday, though his precise birthdate is unknown. We also do not know the cause of his death. His brother-in-law had died a week earlier, which could imply infectious disease, but Shakespeare’s health may have had a longer decline. The memorial bust of Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford is considered one of two authentic likenesses, because it was approved by people who knew him. The other such likeness is the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, produced seven years after his death by his friends and colleagues from the King’s Men. View a timeline of Shakespeare’s life with links to key supporting documents on Shakespeare Documented . View timeline The bust of Shakespeare in the Folger Reading Room is a copy of the statue at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Frequently asked questions Why did shakespeare leave his wife his “second best bed”. William Shakespeare wrote in his last will and testament, dated March 25, 1616, “Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture” (furniture is used to refer to the curtains and bedcover which formed part of the complete bed). This was not an unusual bequest, nor was it likely to have been intended as a snub. The best bed was usually regarded as an heirloom piece, to be passed to the heir rather than the spouse. It is also probable that the best bed would have been reserved for guests, meaning the “second best” was the bed that William and Anne shared. What did Shakespeare’s son die of? We don’t really know how Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet died. He had a twin sister named Judith, who lived to adulthood and married, but Hamnet died at the age of 11 and a half. Child mortality was high in the 16th century; there were no antibiotics and many childhood diseases might therefore prove fatal, such as scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, and even measles. He was buried on August 11, 1596. What is the inscription on Shakespeare’s grave? GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES. Did Shakespeare have a coat of arms? Yes, William’s father, John Shakespeare, was granted a coat of arms in 1596. It was disputed in 1602 by York Herald, Ralph Brooke, saying that the arms were too similar to existing coats of arms, and that the family was unworthy. However, the challenge was unsuccessful, as the Shakespeare coat of arms appears in later heraldic collections and on William Shakespeare’s funeral monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Does Shakespeare have descendants? William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had three children. The eldest, Susanna, was baptized on May 26, 1583, and married John Hall in 1607. They had one child, Elizabeth, in 1608. Elizabeth was married twice, to Thomas Nash in 1626, and to John Bernard in 1649. However, she had no children by either husband. William and Anne also had twins, Judith and Hamnet, who were baptized on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died at age 11 and a half. Judith married Thomas Quiney in 1616, and the couple had three sons: Shakespeare Quiney, who died in infancy, and Richard and Thomas, who both died in 1639 within a month of each other. Since neither of the boys married, there is no possibility of any legitimate descendants from Shakespeare’s line. It is possible, however, to claim a relationship to Shakespeare through his sister, Joan. She married William Hart some time before 1600, and there are many descendants of this marriage alive today, in both the male and female lines. Stay connected Find out what’s on, read our latest stories, and learn how you can get involved. 111 IMAGES A Midsummer Nights Dream By William Shakespeare Essay Example Differences Between the Shakespeare Globe and Modern Theatre Essay Theatre in the age of Shakespeare Free Essay Example Play Review: Macbeth by William Shakespeare: [Essay Example], 467 words William Shakespeare Free Essay Example William Shakespeare Essay COMMENTS Shakespeare's theater Shakespeare's company planned for years to operate its own indoor theater, a goal that was finally achieved in 1609 when the Burbages took over London's Blackfriars theater. Still more indoor productions often came during the period between Christmas and New Year, and at Shrovetide (the period before Lent) at one of the royal palaces, where ... Shakespeare on Theatre A hundred yards or so southeast of the new Globe Theatre is a vacant lot surrounded by a corrugated-iron fence marked with a bronze plaque as the site of the original Globe Theatre of 1599. A little closer to the new Globe, one can peer through dirty slit windows into a dimly lit space in the basement of a new office building, next to London Bridge, where about two-thirds of the foundations of ... Shakespeare's Theater: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions The Children of Paul's dissolved around 1606. By about 1608 the Children of the Chapel Royal had been forced to stop playing at the Blackfriars theater, which was then taken over by the King's Men, Shakespeare's own troupe. Acting companies and theaters of Shakespeare's time seem to have been organized in various ways. William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon) was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature.Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo ... Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance for Arden Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period. ... Oxford. She specialises in Shakespeare, theatre history ... Essays on Shakespeare's Theaters and Entertainment in Elizabethan England Essays, Articles, and Book Excerpts on Shakespeare's Theatres and Elizabethan England. The Globe in Shakespeare's Day. The Royal Palaces. Shakespeare's Audience in his Day. Going to a Play in Shakespeare's London. London's First Public Playhouse. Shakespeare's Boss. Shakespeare Hits the Big Time. Dramatic Criticism in Shakespeare's Time Dramatic Criticism in Shakespeare's Time. The more fully informed we are about earlier theatres in other societies, however remote and alien, the more we discover exactly what expectations were shared by their audiences and met by theatre professionals then and now. This certainly includes the medieval antecedents of the Shakespearean theatre ... Macbeth Macbeth was published for the first time in the 1623 First Folio (F1) and that text is the basis for all modern editions of the play. First Folio (1623) Second Folio (1632) Read and download Macbeth for free. Learn about this Shakespeare play, find scene-by-scene summaries, and discover more Folger resources. Shakespeare Studies & Criticism Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies, publishing highly original, rigorously researched essays, notes, and book reviews. Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Oxford University Press, SQ is peer-reviewed and extremely selective. Read our Author Guidelines to find out how to submit your work PDF Essays on Shakespearean Theatre SHAKESPEARE S WORKPLACE Essays on Shakespearean Theatre. oad, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467Cambridge. University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and re. 781316618271 doi: 10.1017/9781316. Hamlet The Hamlets of the Theatre. New York: Astor-Honor, 1968. Calderwood, James L. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. ... In Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, edited by Philip Brockbank, 103-14. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. PDF The Audience-Actor Relationship at Shakespeare's Globe a contemporary theatre experience are exciting aspects of Paige Greco's excellent 2009 essay, "The Audience-Actor Relationship at Shakespeare's Globe." Her writing is clear, cogent, and very much alive. Over the years I have read many essays from students writing about historical aspects of theatre and theatrical conventions. Shakespeare Quarterly About Shakespeare Quarterly. Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ) is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies, publishing highly original, rigorously researched essays, notes, and book reviews. Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by the Oxford University Press (OUP), SQ is peer-reviewed and very selective. The essays in our published pages span the field and feature readings of Shakespeare's ... PDF 400 years of immortality (September 26-29, 2016) Shakespeare Readings have been held in Russia for more than half a century. The 2016 Shakespeare Conference in Moscow offers the following aspects for papers and discussions: Shakespeare and his contemporaries in intercultural exchange, including (but not limited to): - theatre; - translation; Shakespeare's Audience: The Groundlings Shakespeare's audience would have been composed of tanners, butchers, iron-workers, millers, seamen from the ships docked in the Thames, glovers, servants, shopkeepers, wig-makers, bakers, and countless other tradesmen and their families. Ben Jonson commented on the diversity of the playgoers in his verses praising Fletcher's The Faithful ... As they like it: Shakespeare in Russia "Tolstoy's essay 'Shakespeare and Drama' rails against everything from the implausibility of Shakespeare's characters to his supposed aristocratic sympathies" Even before his death in 1616, Shakespeare's plays were being toured up the Baltic coast by hardy troupes of English actors, who, by the 1640s, got as far north as Riga. But ... Don't Cancel Shakespeare—Yet The institutionalization of Shakespeare in schools, universities, and theatre, has traditionally meant centering a white, male perspective and preaching that it speaks for everyone; in other words ... What Shakespeare can teach us about racism In his 1964 essay "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," James Baldwin detailed his initial resistance. Like many people today, Baldwin wrote that he, too, was "a victim of that loveless ... Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare and his world. Learn more about Shakespeare, his theater, and his plays from the experts behind our editions. Shakespeare's Life An essay about Shakespeare and the time in which he lived. Shakespeare's Theater An essay about what theaters were like during Shakespeare's career. The Publication of Shakespeare's Plays Nemirovich-Danchenko: A life dedicated to theatre Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko brought several progressive ideas to Russian performing art and co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre along with Stanislavsky. The name of the renowned director Vladimir ... Royal Shakespeare Company Rounds Out Cast for 'Othello' The Shakespeare tragedy is set to run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from Oct. 11 to Nov. 23. Read More About: John Douglas Thompson, Othello, Royal Shakespeare Company; The Winter's Tale Shakespeare and his world. Learn more about Shakespeare, his theater, and his plays from the experts behind our editions. Shakespeare's Life An essay about Shakespeare and the time in which he lived. Shakespeare's Theater An essay about what theaters were like during Shakespeare's career. The Publication of Shakespeare's Plays Moscow Art Theatre The Moscow Art Theatre (Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny Akademichesky Teatr), commonly known by its acronyms MKhT and MKhAT, is probably the most renowned theatre company in Russia.It is the birthplace of modern drama. Its name is bound up with the founding fathers of modern theatre and drama, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, as well as with giants of Russian twentieth ... Shakespeare's life Since William Shakespeare lived more than 400 years ago, and many records from that time are lost or never existed in the first place, we don't know everything about Shakespeare's life. For example, we know that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, 100 miles northwest of London, on April 26, 1564. But we don't know his exact birthdate ... essay homework paper phd project resume review speech thesis