Underbelly

My favorite Shakespeare teacher (55 years ago) really gave a workover to Romeo and Juliet .  She showed how it is a flawed play but interest...

Watching the last of those wonderful " Shakespeare Master Classes " with John Barton (I wish there were 20 more), I see that he pi...

We caught Jude Law's Broadway Hamlet this afternoon, on $25 tickets which offered a perfectly adequate view of the stage, albeit a long...

I went looking for Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 on Google yesterday and stumbled onto something new to me--sonnets on YouTube. Make sense wh...

Is it true, as The Economist says in his obituary, that Irving Kristol carried a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets around with him, "t...

Research Digest asks: what do you do to stay sane? Tyler Cowen rounds up some plausible suspects: surprise hugs (watch it there, big guy...

Four hundred and one years ago today, the first dateable performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—aboard the sailing vessel Red Dragon, anchored ...

Once again, the subject is Ashland theatre, specifically the question of letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare. When I watched Othello , I tho...

Hm. I said yesterday that it looked like Ashland had decided to trust Shakespeare. I guess I spoke too soon. Lat night I saw the Midsummer N...

We're back at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland for some more theater. I've complained before that Ashland seems to get spo...

Well hey--here's a reprint of a book that probably couldn't be written by any person alive. Which is why it is so good to see that i...

Terry Teachout discovers The Rough Guide to Shakespeare ( link ) --which he might have discovered here or here . Note that I get my two c...

I can remember the first time that ever I saw a Caravaggio. It was the summer of 1985. I was staying at a pension in Rome, out near the...

I don’t think I had ever heard of Barbara Everett until I ran across her piece on “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet” in the May 8 issu...

For Shakespeare’s birthday (which may or may not be today), Ron Rosenbaum has a “reading list” up at Slate , but for a guy who did a book ...

Ever notice how much “pride” figures in Shakespeare? Here is a light selection, out of many possibilities: King Henry IV : …that title...

Michael Pennington's "User's Guide" to Midsummer Night's Dream , didn't read as easily as his guide to Hamlet . P...

Just now learned (from Michael Pennington's excellent commentary on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream ) that the original me...

Some people say the greatest Shakespeare movie is Russian. That would be the Hamlet (“ Gamlet” !) of Grigori Kozintsev, first shown in th...

One more bit of debunking. This one is a tad recherché, but it is a favorite of mine so I will go on with it. You remember Dr. Bowdler,...