Hamlets' Rehab, Sherlock's Birthdays, and a Forger's Hair

Plus: The film Disney *almost* made instead of "10 Things..."

Lots of news this week + catching up from last week = all links. Enjoy!

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Quick Links

• Of all the things that delight me about Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland (and there are many¹) attaching his own hair to a letter is at the top.²

• Bard on the Beach is releasing some of their amazing educational resources for free.³

• On the LA fires and The Tempest: “Shakespeare helps me envisage the unimaginable.”⁴

• From Shakespeare to Sheet Metal.

• Disney almost made a script called School Slut instead of 10 Things I Hate About You.

• David Tennant thinks he would be “a very obvious Andrew Aguecheek.”

• Rehab for Hamlets. “If you start quoting too much from the play, you get an electric shock through a neck implant.” (h/t to Edel Semple)

• This Lear-in-a-ruined-theater has been making the internet rounds.

• Is it time to ditch accents on stage? “As recently as 2022, it still felt genuinely a big deal to have a Black Country Hamlet at the Globe….”

• You will be absolutely shocked to learn that when discussing the topic of “damn, we’re old,” Stephen Colbert reaches for a Tolkien quote and Alan Cumming reaches for Shakespeare.⁵

• If you can bear some Shakespeare and politics discourse.

• Doublings/Rep roles! The Organist (!) and Curio and Cleopatra and Oberon.

• It is apparently entirely correct to refer to the “triology” of Henry VI.⁶

• Leah Libresco included some beautiful thoughts on the article I wrote about the Guthrie Histories in her own newsletter. “I’m always interested in acts of maintenance as ‘boring’ ways to touch the sublime.”

• Sherlock Holmes’ birthday is traditionally celebrated on Twelfth Night but pedants gonna pedant.⁷

• The danger of Midsummer is making it “just a sort of gossamer confection.”

• “It’s unlikely anyone’s doing Selimus anytime soon, so it’ll have to be King Lear”

• I did know that a 1930’s gangster had his leg amputated in a Riverside Drive brothel after an armed robbery gone wrong,⁸ but I did not know that Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe briefly lived on the same block between 105th and 106th. (30 years earlier. Still.)

• Simon Godwin on being artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre and encountering Goethe at age 13: “My job is to bring playfulness everyday into the spaces that I lead.”

• If Mama Rose is the “female King Lear,” is Elektra the “female Hamlet”?

• Rehearsal photos for the Bridge Theatre’s Richard II (Bridgerton fans this way please…) and the Jamie Lloyd Company’s Much Ado⁹ (…and Marvel fans over here.)

• Emma Smith on Macbeth and Twelfth Night.

• “What are critics for?” via Measure and Dr. Johnson.

• A “spatial archive” of Hall’s Croft.

• Obituaries: Claire van Kampen, Joan Plowright,¹⁰ and Mel Shapiro.

• The (traditional Scottish) music of (the Tennant/Jumbo) Macbeth.

• The 2025 McGill Shakespeare lecture will feature outgoing Stratford Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino. (January 21, Online/free)

Recommendations

• The Great Teddy Bear Panic of 1907.¹¹

• Gorey envelopes.

• A performance of the first four books of the Odyssey in Ancient Greek.

• Money (manufacture) made the Roman Empire “slightly stupider.”

• A left-handed Gandhi letter.

• Reactions to the phrase “immersive entertainment experience…”

• I always look forward to the annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing, please enjoy this chart.

  

1. Have you read Vortigern? It is so bad. Please read it. John Philip Kemble tried to sabotage opening night every way he knew how.

2. Spelling the recipient’s name “Anne Hatherrewaye” is close behind.

3. Courtesy of their Director of Education Mary Hartman. One of the only bright spots of the pandemic was ending up in a Zoom room with Mary and discovering that, in addition to being a generous and brilliant human, she was also my first Helena.

4. I loved this: “if I lost my books, I wouldn’t know who I was. It’s how I’ve defined myself as an adult making my way in the world.” Last week I stopped into John Windle’s bookstore in San Francisco. He and his staff were incredibly warm and generous, pulling an enormous book of Boydell Shakespeare engravings and a odd little book of King John sources to look at. They specialize in Blake, and were anxiously waiting for a phone call that would tell them if a large collection of his work had burned. We left before finding out the answer but their kindness in the midst of crisis was moving.

5. Specifically, “crowned with many winters” from The Lord of the Rings and “I have gained my experience” from As You Like It. (Colbert’s love for LOTR is very well documented and Alan Cumming has done a one-man(ish) Macbeth on Broadway, Julie Taymor’s Titus, and is currently spraying Shakespeare quotes like linguistic pesticide on “The Traitors.”)

6. Substack’s spellcheck *strongly* disagrees.

7. Once the 567 Council of Tours is invoked nothing good will follow.

8. Thank you New York Historical Society tours.

9. There will be dance. (Historically true.)

10. Her Joan is still a marvel fifty years on.

11. To get the bitter taste of scientific racism out of your mouth, may I recommend this description of conserving the original Winnie-The-Pooh? “The plush on Pooh’s bottom was gently steamed and fluffed using, among other things, a microspatula.”