Shakespeare in the world

Arts administrator, writer, and advocate Howard Sherman recently saw The Winter’s Tale for the first time. He shares his approach to seeing Shakespeare after decades of theatergoing and the rewards of letting the production speak first.

Americans have conscripted Shakespeare in causes all the way back to Jamestown’s founding. Looking ahead, in a fractured world might Shakespeare’s talent for giving “us pause” or “time to pause. And attend” unite us in a new consensus?

Shakespeare’s plays—and plays and musicals inspired by him—are always a feature of the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. Austin Tichenor shares some of the 40 productions playing in Scotland this August.

The word happiness had multiple meanings at the time that Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, and those different definitions also appear in Shakespeare, a writer whom Jefferson admired.

Traveling the world to see as many Shakespeare First Folios as possible, Greg Doran views an unusual copy at the Craven Museum, one in which all the comedies have been removed and which Charlotte Bronte may have read.

Scholar James Shapiro looks at how Shakespeare has always “served as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to threats to our fragile democracy.” He offers as a recent example the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in Central Park.

For the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, we asked Shakespeare scholars what part Shakespeare may play in America’s next three centuries. Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper writes that Shakespeare and what we do with him is more essential than ever if democracy is to thrive.

60 years after the premiere of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a new stage comedy is using Stoppard’s absurdist template to explore the fears and struggles of the two main clowns from Much Ado About Nothing.

Scholar Jean E. Feerick looks at how Hamnet takes us back to a premodern world when people knew how deeply nature pervades us. Inspired by Shakespeare’s own eco-sensibility, Zhao’s film invites us to consider anew our place in the world.

In an excerpt from her new book about when literature spoke truth to power during the Red Scare, critic Marjorie Garber looks at how Shakespeare inspired journalist Edward R. Murrow and the role it continued to play in his reporting.

Austin Tichenor writes about why the behind-the-scenes workings of a Shakespeare theater festival make for such great television in Slings and Arrows and the connections with its sequel-in-spirit American Classic starring Kevin Kline.

150 years after her death Margaret of Anjou returned as a character in four early Shakespeare plays, Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III. She’s found fans in every era since, including in community performances on the island of Roatán.