The excellent Brussels English-language bookshop, Sterling Books (on Rue du Fosse aux Loups / Wolvengrachtstraat, behind the Munt/Monnaie) had the excellent notion the other day of offering ARCs to interested customers (thanks to Aoife for alerting me). I had previously very much enjoyed two of Shapiro's other Shakespeare books, 1599 and Contested ( Read more... )

This is a bold step by BBC books: a set of sketches which basically all revolve around the same joke, the Doctor (and the Whoniverse) intruding in the fictional world of Shakespeare's plays. The authors include James Goss, who for my money is the best current writer of Who prose, and Matthew Sweet, who brings a certain lit crit depth to proceedings ( Read more... )

...as for the Shakespearian MS., who could have made bold, any time within these last hundred and sixty years, to proclaim that he who would set eyes upon it need only raise his hand and take it down from its shelf in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum?
This is one of the classics of Shakespeariana and indeed of palæography, and ( Read more... )

Blogging has been very light round here for the last week or so - I have been travelling a lot, with some unexpected wrinkles and last-minute changes of plan, am behind in bookblogging and also in the middle of three very thick books.

But I will break my silence with notes on a couple of screen adaptations which I watched today of texts which I ( Read more... )

We watched the next in the Beeb's current Shakespeare season in two goes over Sunday and Monday nights, and I felt that although enjoyable and dramatic - the tavern and battle scenes particularly well staged - it didn't quite grab me in the same way that Richard II did.

steepholm has crystallised the problem for me. The production allowed Simon Russell ( Read more... )

I am joining the chorus of praise for the BBC staging of Richard II last weekend. The high point is certainly Patrick Stewart's fantastic rendition of the "This Sceptred Isle" speech, as John of Gaunt, in the second act, but it's all rather fantastic - especially Ben Whishaw in the title role and Rory Kinnear as Bolingbroke. It also rather ( Read more... )

Another excellent series of podcasts from the BBC, exploring Shakespeare's plays in the wider context of culture, politics and knowledge of the times; twenty 13-minute pieces, all presented by Neil McGregor, the Director of the British Museum, who was such a success with the History of the World in 100 Objects podcast series. The single one which ( Read more... )

This was on my list to read this summer anyway, but it was nice to have got to it after the references in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Carlo Gebler's play about the Lambs. It's really very good - a retelling of Shakespeare's dramas, which are not really easy reading for today's reader (or even the reader of 1807) in ( Read more... )

Someone has obviously pointed out my review of Shapiro's Contested Will to the deniers. *points and laughs*

An excellent book about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, which was a topic I once wasted quite a lot of online time on (between about 2000 and 2004). Shapiro is not really writing about the balance of evidence on either side, though he makes it clear that his sympathies are with the Stratford man rather than with Francis Bacon or the Earl of ( Read more... )