Shakespeare Sells: Pens, K-Pop, and STDs

Plus: Lady Macbeth vs. Tom Ripley

This newsletter has footnotes.¹ If you click on the email headline or visit shakespearenews.com, the footnotes will appear when you hover over them.

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Quick Links

• That time (March 1990) the Department of Defense used Shakespeare to warn soldiers about STDs.

• If William Shakespeare Wrote Romeo and Juliet with a Bic Xtra Life.²

• An Oxford researcher discovered a manuscript copy of a Royalist adaptation of everyone’s favorite wedding sonnet.

  Self blinding error seize all those minds
  Who with false appellations call that love
  Which alters when it alterations finds

• Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale discuss Edward II and Richard II.

• Imelda Staunton was the social director on the Much Ado set.

  In between shots she was booking restaurants and “trying to get kitty money out of all of them to try and do the shopping”. Did they all cough up? “We had a bit of a problem with Keanu.” (“Gorgeous man,” she adds.)

• Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare?³ (h/t Benjamin Broadribb)⁴

• Vote for “The Best Villains in Literature.” Current match-ups include Iago vs. Mrs. Danvers and Lady Macbeth vs. Tom Ripley.⁵

• An As You Like It-inspired K-Pop album.

• The adaptation of Romeo and Juliet currently playing at the Armory in NYC is “overwhelmingly infantile, comically apolitical, excessively pessimistic about the future, and tragically hollow beneath all the hype.”⁶

• Someone paid $897 for a ticket to Othello on Broadway.

• This excellent article on Toni Morrison’s Emmett Till play reveals more of her theater background: “As a student at Howard University, she acted in Richard III.”

• “The works he produced in Studio One included an Othello inspired by Cubist art he’d seen on a trip to Paris; three actors played each part, representing a different part of their character’s psyche.”⁷

• Love’s Labours Lost set in Ibiza.

• “It is since the earthquake now eleven years.” (No, really.)

• “…by shifting the action from throne room to boardroom, the production loses Shakespeare’s understanding of Richard’s royal aesthetic and of the mystic culture behind divinely appointed kingship.”⁸ (h/t Charlene V. Smith)

• Of all the things you could comfort watch, the Cumberbatch Richard III is a CHOICE.⁹

• Wendell Pierce’s Othello should be magnificent.¹⁰

• The RSC’s Hamlet set is very fancy.¹¹

• “Iago is played by a pack of cigarettes; he will kill you.” / “Iago wants to be loved”

• Appalachian and Disco R&Js.

• “The play features just three characters: Ophelia, Gertrude, and a maid named Anna…”

• The author of If We Were Villains on revising, agents, and more.

• “Bailey’s Richard cannot express himself except as a performance for others.”

• Foundationing: A New Approach to Shakespeare.

• Woo woo! All aboard the Shakespeare Express!

• “King Lear is on his bucket list.” (Yes. Please.)

• A children’s Shakespeare and an opera Lear are nominated for Oliviers.

• A soccer/football themed Much Ado.

• “Near the front is Lilly, 22, who saw the first half of the play then opted to join the queue rather than watch the rest. (‘I’ll read up on the story afterwards!’)”

• “Lady Macbeth is mournfully disposing of baby clothes when her husband leaves her a voice message to tell her about his encounter with the three sisters.”

• “…a dramaturg would look at it nowadays and go, ‘Whoa! Pick a story, Bill.’”

• Repurposing Henry IV’s deathbed as Titania’s bower.

Recommendations

• “What! Do you think we were born in the woods to be frightened by owls?”

• There’s a theater in the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

• Metal, Melville, and the Met.

• “It’s weird when you can point to the moment that doomed a city’s art culture.”

• The man who reinvented the hammer.

• Battleship Kate.

• The patron saint of ice skaters.

• This entomologist's cane.

• This magnificent poem. (h/t Edel Semple)

1. Like this one.

2. The idea was hatched six years ago “but the cost of hiring a calligrapher and typographer was prohibitive.” [Enter AI Stage Left]

3. Your annual reminder that Dickens played Justice Shallow to out-bid P.T. Barum for Shakespeare’s Birthplace.

4. Ben also sent along this. If you thought “Miss Piggy, in the sauna, with Nureyev, singing ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside.’” wasn’t enough, I present “Mel Gibson, in the sauna, with Dame Edna, talking Hamlet.” Also Elizabethan theories of melancholy and animal husbandry.

5. My money’s on the Lady. Dagger beats oar.

6. It looks very Urban Outfitters.

7. The dawning realization that, despite being designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, “this may be the worst theatre ever built.”

8. “….at the age of 13, [Jonathan Bailey] was a young Prince Arthur in Gregory Doran’s King John, which is a thankless initiation to Shakespeare’s histories.” (Four child actors covered the role.)

9. If anyone can explain why he woos Lady Anne in a forest, you are wiser than I.

10. Colbert got the scoop (and a bit of Clarence).

11. Es Devlin’s description of Jared Harris leaping onto the heavily-raked stage is delightful. Curious to know more about the action of play taking place in a single night.