Shakespeare quotes about fools
Shakespeare mentions the word “fool” more than 300 times. Here are seven quotes, often spoken by one of his wise—and witty—fools.
“God help the wicked”: Searching for redemption in Shakespeare
Austin Tichenor explores how the shift of a narrative’s perspective can offer answers to questions about which characters deserve redemption and our forgiveness, from Lear to Iago to Richard III.
Advice from the players: 10 great actors on performing Shakespeare
Read a few favorite quotes from actors who have joined us on our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Lolita Chakrabarti, the late Glenda Jackson, Sir Derek Jacobi, Paterson Joseph, Adrian Lester, Sir Ian McKellen, Patrick Page, the late Antony Sher, Harriet Walter, and Stephan Wolfert offer their insights on everything from backstory to the famous bits to the question no actor should ask.
Excerpt: "King Lear: Shakespeare's Dark Consolations"
“King Lear is about insiders who with terrible suddenness are shoved outside, and what they learn or don’t learn from finding themselves positioned there,” writes Arthur Frank.
Making BEDLAM: Creating a Shakespeare mash-up series
Production crew of BEDLAM: The Series. Photo by Ashley Garrett. Eric Tucker is an off-Broadway director and Artistic Director of Bedlam Theatre. Musa Gurnis is an early modern theater scholar and actor. When we pitched our Shakespeare mash-up series BEDLAM…
Excerpt: Learwife by J. R. Thorp
Picking up where Shakespeare’s King Lear ends, a new novel imagines the life of Lear’s wife, who in this telling has been banished for 15 years when she receives word of her family members’ deaths. Learwife by J.R. Thorp gives…
Of Roys and kings: “The shadow of Succession”
Austin Tichenor explores the copious Shakespearean echoes in HBO’s Succession series, in which the Shakespearean actor Brian Cox plays a key role.
Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays
How do Shakespeare’s plays reflect a life filled with plague outbreaks, asks Austin Tichenor — and do we see his plays in new ways now?
And so they play their parts: Double-casting Shakespeare’s plays
Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s…
William Charles Macready and the restoration of William Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’
Imagine a King Lear that cut the character of the Fool, created a romance between Edgar and Cordelia, and featured a happy ending in which Lear and Cordelia both live. That was the most popular version of Shakespeare’s play for…
“Ambiguous and dangerous meat:” Herpetophagy in the early modern world
Why was herpetophagy (eating reptiles and amphibians) linked with madness in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”? Unpack the cultural anxieties involved in early modern English encounters with unfamiliar dietary norms.
The madness of Hamlet and King Lear: When psychiatrists used Shakespeare to argue legal definitions of insanity in the courtroom
King Lear, III, 2. Johann Heinrich Ramberg. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. Well-known Shakespeare characters such as King Lear and Hamlet suffer (or appear to suffer) from madness — and early American psychiatrists took note. Observations drawn from literature began…