Underbelly

A quick shoutout for .s delightful for William Egginton's new book about Cervantes .  It's a sort of a biography but it's bette...

A Serious Person would write about Ebola or the Yazidis or the soon-to-be-former Colorado River.  For the moment, I'll stick to Shakesp...

I was telling the keeper of the Chez Buce Netflix queue that my favorite Antony and Cleopatra --indeed, the only good one I had ever seen b...

Hast thou not seen one of our late Kings slain in the midst of his sports?  And one of his ancestors die miserably by the chocke of an hog...

We've Found Shakespeare's Dictionary!--We got it on Ebay!   So goes the headline (lightly paraphrased).  Well you never say never, ...

My friend Michael catches a typo in my latest Caravaggio post .  His prize is a set of curated links to Underbelly 's best Caravaggio po...

R.A. Foakes explores a nice point of millinery in discussing Shakespeare's play about the King who would and would not surrender the at...

The critic G. Wilson Knight goes looking for the root of Shakespeare's art in the soil of contemporary Elizabeth society and somehow st...

Over dinner the other night, our friend Becky dismissed an absent presence as "fit to be sent on errands." Cute, said I.  Wher...

The 463d anniversary of Jack Cade's rebellion , the prompt for the most famous lawyer jape of all time, infra.   And as good a time as ...

[Somehow I didn't post this on the 24th.]  Wups, missed Shakespeare's 449th yesterday.  I suppose (but I have not looked) that ther...

Of the late King R ichard III , buried Hoffa-style under a bunch of concrete , John writes:  I suppose after being in a parking lot for t...

You remember H. C. Goddard?  I wrote an appreciative squib about his Shakespeare commentaries a year ago September.  Comes now one Sue K (...

Idling through Harold Goddard's admirable essays on Shakespeare, I happened on one I don't think I had read before : his discussion...

Sometimes the sentiment is so strong it busts clean out of the form: Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of tr...

It's not my intention to turn this into an all-Shakespeare blog, but Ken beguiles me with a question : was Shakespeare Italian?  No, th...

Hey, here's a find: the inimitable S tephen Fry, reading Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 130 --the one that begins "My mistress...

Finishing up the Chez Buce presentation of Il Barbiere di Seviglia ( the "broken leg" version ) we got to chatting about the pec...

A well-wisher has favored Chez Buce with a copy of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy , by one Richard Paul Roe, otherwise unknown to me.  Note...

Happy 396th, Bill: here i am ben says bill nothing but a lousy playwright and with anything like luck in the breaks i might have been ...