News on the Rialto

2008-05-09T09:18:00.004-04:00

ShakespeareScene

444 years after Shakespeare’s birth, specialist publishing company, Ashokan International Ltd is publishing a brand new magazine entitled ShakespeareScene.

The twice yearly colour magazine will be launched in mid-May and will be a well designed publication for the public and Shakespeare enthusiasts around the world. It will include news about the times of Shakespeare, interviews and articles plus a great listing of productions and festivals due to take place over the summer
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Available from specialist outlets in the UK and Borders and also from its web-site www.shakespearescene.com

2008-05-09T08:15:00.002-04:00

Verdi vs. Shakespeare in a ‘Macbeth’ Showdown: Call It a Draw

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
New York Times

There are two gripping productions of “Macbeth” in New York right now.

The darkly theatrical, cinematic staging directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is now at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway.

Then there is the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s operatic adaptation of that Shakespeare drama, a breakthrough work for the young Verdi, first performed in 1847. The Met’s grim, boldly updated production by the director Adrian Noble, which opened in October, returns on Friday with a new cast, led by the baritone Carlos Álvarez, the soprano Hasmik Papian as Lady Macbeth, and, in the crucial role of Banquo, the formidable bass René Pape. James Levine conducts.

2008-05-08T15:48:00.002-04:00

Henry VI: World-class Orgy of Gore and Humour

Charles Spencer reviews Henry VI pts 1,2, 3 by the RSC at the Roundhouse, Camden

By common consent, these early plays by Shakespeare aren't a patch on Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V. Indeed, scholars are still divided over just how much of the Henry VI trilogy Shakespeare actually wrote.

Henry VI brings a sense of shivery mystery to the stage

But there is no feeling one is watching crude prentice work in Michael Boyd's knock-out production of this trilogy about England's bloody Wars of the Roses, a thrilling all-day orgy of gore-dripping violence, gallows humour and craven betrayal.

2008-05-06T11:02:00.001-04:00

Were the World Mine: Shaking up Shakespeare

Were the World Mine closes the 10th Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on a musical, fantastical note. The movie, which director Tom Gustafson expanded from his short film Fairies, takes the familiar scenarios of high school angst and adolescent crushes and gives them a wonderful musical spin, complete with elaborate sets and choreography.

Cleverly borrowing from A Midsummer's Night Dream in ways Shakespeare could have never imagined, the movie centers on Timothy (Tanner Cohen), a gay student at a private school who harbors a secret crush on rugby star Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker).

With ‘Cardenio’ the Shakespeare Scholar Stephen Greenblatt Brushes Up His Playwriting - New York Times

2008-05-04T16:31:00.000-04:00

With ‘Cardenio’ the Shakespeare Scholar Stephen Greenblatt Brushes Up His Playwriting

THERE are classes on Shakespeare at Harvard University that students are happy to see dismissed early, especially when the spring weather grows as enticing as Titania’s bower, or the gossips at Lamont, the undergraduate library, have some unusually esoteric knowledge to impart.
Not when Stephen Greenblatt is teaching.

One of the country’s top Shakespeare scholars, Mr. Greenblatt, the Cogan university professor of the humanities, enjoys rock star status on campus. His lectures are legendary, and gaining admission to one of his limited-enrollment seminars is an academic brass ring.

But on a Tuesday afternoon last month he had to cut short his seminar on “Hamlet” to be on time for his maiden voyage into making theater. Professor Greenblatt, 64, has written his first play, “Cardenio,” a collaboration with Charles Mee, and was expected at the opening rehearsal.

Theater: Many faces of Macbeth | csmonitor.com

2008-05-02T09:46:00.000-04:00

Theater: Many Faces of Macbeth

Despite its timelessness, Shakespeare's "Macbeth" has proven difficult to precisely date. Scholars disagree, but it's presumed that the play was written between 1603 and 1606. This year, however, a slew of innovative new stagings of "the Scottish Play," each with wildly different visions of the piece – one turns the famous witches into male monsters, one depicts them as ghostly nurses, another does away with them altogether – are proving that "Macbeth" is easier to update.

Lose the language and you lose Shakespeare | Books | Guardian Unlimited

2008-05-02T08:59:00.000-04:00

Lose the language and you lose Shakespeare

Shakespeare Patron Emerges, Ghostly - New York Times

2008-04-30T08:05:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare Patron Emerges, Ghostly - New York Times

2008-04-17T08:26:00.003-04:00

Supermarket Shakespeare

O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
That would be the '20 per cent off' leg of lamb in the freezer section Hamlet is trying to defrost in time for Sunday lunch... And that's pretty much the kind of thing you can expect to bump into if you go to Supermarket Shakespeare in Lee Green this weekend and the beginning of next week.

Teatro Vivo are presenting Supermarket Shakespeare, exactly what it sounds like as the six-strong team of actors will be performing Shakespeare in a supermarket. They are going to be in the Lee Green branch of Sainsbury's, adding extra value to your shopping as they perform extracts from the bard's sonnets in the loose produce, biscuits, dairy and fish aisles.

Southwest Shakespeare Company attempts World Record with Shakespeare Marathon - Phoenix Arizona Events Arts, Entertainment and Events in the Phoenix Scottsdale Mesa East Valley Communities

2008-04-11T18:56:00.000-04:00

Southwest Shakespeare Company attempts World Record with Shakespeare Marathon

Southwest Shakepeare Company has decided to take on their most challenging role yet, they are presenting a 5 day reading of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 24 hours a day, with back to back plays, sonnets and poems written by the Bard himself.

2008-04-11T11:08:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare 24

Shakespeare 24, an extraordinary worldwide day of performance. Beginning in New Zealand and ending 24 hours later in Hawaii, youth theatres and school groups will stage abridged plays at 7pm in their respective time zones on Wednesday, April 23rd 2008, Shakespeare’s birthday.

2008-04-05T09:23:00.001-04:00

Japanese director Kurita to feature at German Shakespeare festival

Neuss, Germany - A production of The Winter's Tale in Japanese is to feature at the annual festival in Neuss, Germany devoted to the plays of William Shakespeare, organizers said Friday.

Japanese director Yoshihiro Kurita has been engaged with his Japanese version of the Winter's Tale, the first time Kurita's production will be shown in Germany. English supertitles will be displayed for the benefit of non-speakers of Japanese.

2008-04-03T09:41:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare to be Cloned for Upcoming Festival!

By Mistress Ann Hathaway
April 01, 2008

In what was described as the “ultimate marketing tool,” backers of the proposed Shakespeare Chattanooga festival have announced that they have obtained a sample of the playwright’s DNA and will clone him.

“We fully expect that he will write a whole new canon of plays and sonnets,” said one SC board of directors member. “Titles such as The Merry Wives of Red Bank and Much Ado About Nooga have already been proposed.”

Speaking under condition of strict anonymity, the same source revealed that a secret expedition was sent to Stratford-on-Avon to dig up a bit of the Bard. Posing as members of Chattanooga’s elite SWAT team, they pretended to demonstrate how the site could be protected against marauding Christopher Marlowe-lovers, while actually doing a micro-excavation that successfully extracted the genius’s genes.

“It was pretty easy, really,” the source revealed. “Those Brits have watched so much Law and Order they’ll believe anything.”

Asked about the famous curse engraved on Shakespeare’s tomb (Good Friend for Jesus sake forbeare/To digg the dust enclosed heare:/Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones/And curst be he yet moves my bones), the source commented, “Well, none of us appears to be curst yet…although several have reported feeling like the Black Death after the red-eye plane trip home.”

adn.com | Life : Convincing cast succeeds in putting Alaska spin on 'Othello'

2008-04-03T08:49:00.000-04:00

Convincing cast succeeds in putting Alaska spin on 'Othello'

Shakespeare's church found in Shoreditch - This Britain, UK - The Independent

2008-03-30T09:13:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare's church found in Shoreditch

Shakespeare's "lost" local church in London may have been found – beneath some flower beds and cracked paving stones. New research has pinpointed the site of the old church of St Leonard, which was the centre of worship and burial for many of the leading actors and personalities of the Shakespearean stage, including the Bard himself. A study of archive material has revealed that much of the building may still exist, buried underground in an extraordinary time capsule.

2008-03-30T09:08:00.001-04:00

Kasie speak has replaced the Elizabethan English, but the stories are still very ‘Shakespeare’

Macbeth in Mzansi? That’s right. William Shakespeare is in South Africa and breathing new life into local television. But, should we care?"

2008-03-28T08:46:00.001-04:00

Shakespeare Goes Digital

LONDON (Reuters) - A U.S. and British library plan to reproduce online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare's plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have joined forces to download their collections, building on the work of the British Library which digitized its collection of quarto editions in 2004.

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos -- Shakespeare's earliest printed editions -- offer the closest known evidence of what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage.

The project is designed to make all of the quartos, many of which are only accessible to scholars, available to the wider public.

The process of downloading the quartos will begin next month and take a year to complete.
Online visitors will be able to compare images side-by-side, lay one facsimile on top of the other, search plays and mark and tag the texts.

As well as highlighting more minor differences between copies of the same quarto, the digital database will also make it easier to study the often wide discrepancies between quartos, including some of Shakespeare's most famous lines.

"There will be countless new ways for scholars, teachers, and students to examine the quarto texts, particularly of 'Hamlet'," said Folger director Gail Kern Paster.

"You find out all sorts of things -- about how the copies went through the press, and also about the printing process," she added.

Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays and collaborated on several more between about 1590 and 1613. He died in 1616.

Mistress Shakespeare - The New York Review of Books

2008-03-28T08:42:00.000-04:00

Mistress Shakespeare - The New York Review of Books:

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer reviewed by Stanley Wells

It is now over two hundred years since the discovery of a love letter written by William Shakespeare to his future bride, Ann (or Anne, or even Agnes) Hathaway. Along with it came a silk-tied lock of the poet's hair and verses bearing eloquent testimony to his love:"

Mistress Shakespeare - The New York Review of Books

2008-03-28T08:41:00.000-04:00

Mistress Shakespeare - The New York Review of Books

Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer reviewed by Stanley Wells

It is now over two hundred years since the discovery of a love letter written by William Shakespeare to his future bride, Ann (or Anne, or even Agnes) Hathaway. Along with it came a silk-tied lock of the poet's hair and verses bearing eloquent testimony to his love:"

2008-03-25T08:44:00.001-04:00

11 Shakespeare e-books in Macedonian Published

Creative Commons Content Portal for Macedonia published Macedonian translations of eleven Shakespeare plays as downloadable e-books, made available by the renowned storyteller and translator Dragi Mihajlovski.

The e-books have been published in weekly batches of two to three PDF-files between the 8th of February and the 20th of March 20, 2008. The following plays have been published under the Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Macedonia license:

Комедија на забуни (The Comedy of Errors)
Веселите жени од Виндзор (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
Ромео и Јулија (Romeo and Juliet)
Кротењето на опаката (The Taming of the Shrew)
Тимон од Атина (Timon of Athens)
Од влакно ортома (Much Ado About Nothing)
Ричард Трети (Richard III)
Со сила убавина не бидува (Love's Labour's Lost)
Танте за кукуригу (Measure for Measure)
Кориолан (Coriolanus)
Секое зло за арно (All's Well That Ends Well)

2008-03-25T08:37:00.001-04:00

Hath Shakespeare been a tourist in Venice?

It is a question that has perplexed literary scholars for years: how could Shakespeare display such intimate knowledge of Venice in his plays without ever having visited the lagoon city? Now Italian academics have challenged the widely accepted view that the Bard never travelled to Venice but gleaned information from Italian merchants who came to London on business.

2008-03-03T10:36:00.001-05:00

The Haunted

The New Yorker Review of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart at BAM by John Lahr

Among the many contemporary things that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” exploited in its day—the accession to the throne of the first Scottish king of the British Isles; the King’s fascination with witchcraft; the climate of terror that followed the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament—the most significant for us is the Elizabethan public’s newly acquired appetite for hair-raising eloquence. “It was addicted, one might say, to the fortissimo eloquence of inner lives magnificently tortured,” Ted Hughes writes, in his introduction to “The Essential Shakespeare.” To the verbalization of tragic frenzy, Rupert Goold’s inspired modern-dress Stalinist version of “Macbeth” (starring Patrick Stewart, at BAM’s Harvey Theatre) adds a scenic and sonic frenzy that is symphonic in its orchestration and its penetration. Goold’s brilliant production team—with Adam Cork’s soundscape; Lorna Heavey’s smash-cut video and projections; Howard Harrison’s moody lighting design; Anthony Ward’s brutalist set—unsettles the senses and sets the stage for the deracinated and the uncanny. It infuses Macbeth’s crepuscular world with the kind of fear that makes your tongue taste of brass.

2008-03-03T10:28:00.002-05:00

Shakespeare does Kodiak Island

A shaman marries a Russian Desdemona and an Aleut Othello. Behind them lies the mysterious and moody landscape of southwestern Alaska. In front of them awaits misconception and murder.

It’s an age-old story brought to light in Edgeware Production’s Alaska adaptation of Shakespeare’s "Othello."

2008-03-03T09:44:00.001-05:00

Teach Children Shakespeare at Four, says RSC

Shakespeare should be taught to children as young as four, before they have become intimidated by the language, the Royal Shakespeare Company says. Introducing the works of Shakespeare to teenagers is too late, the RSC will argue.

2008-02-25T08:20:00.001-05:00

Shakespeare Marathon & 15,000 liters of “blood”

Do you love Shakespeare, fancy English history and have 1,389 minutes plus to spare? If so, a unique opportunity is available, thanks to a mammoth project by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in what has been described in The Guardian newspaper as “One of the greatest events of modern theatre”.

All eight of the bard’s history plays, covering 100 years of English history, are currently being performed at the RSC’s home in Stratford upon Avon (until 16 March) and then between April 1 and May 25 in London at The Roundhouse. The plays are Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II and III, and Richard III