Shakespeare, Art and Life

By Andy Mousley I sometimes wonder which of Shakespeare’s characters most closely resembles Shakespeare himself: ambitious Macbeth? brooding Hamlet? the simultaneously romantic and anti-romantic Rosalind? It’s idle speculation, of course. Less idle (because the evidence is before us) is to…

Shakespeare’s Metadrama and the Informer

By Bill Angus If you have ever wondered what was really going on in the secret overhearing and tacit observations, the metadramatic inner-plays and devices which Shakespeare constantly revisits, you may have been told that he was ‘playing with the…

St. William of Stratford?

By Sean McEvoy William Shakespeare died four hundred years ago. We know he departed this life on 23 April 1616 because the parish register at Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon records the fact. But we don’t have the same proof that…

Shakespeare’s Questions

By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…

Five Unmissable Performances from Penny Dreadful

By Benjamin Poore For the uninitiated, Penny Dreadful is a genre-busting neo-Victorian fantasy horror show, set in the 1890s, in a world where Victor Frankenstein, his Creature, Professor Van Helsing, and Dorian Gray can all co-exist. It’s a world where…

A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

By Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko Sherlock Holmes, “the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV” (Guinness World Records News), is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in…

Play, Scale and Literature

By Ivan Callus Recent work across literary theory has placed questions of scale in the foreground of critical debate. What is it that’s at stake? Cast your mind back to your childhood engagement with scales of the world, in play.…

Baudelaire in strange places

What has a nineteenth-century French poet got to do with 1960s American electronica? The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) published his controversial verse poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, followed by his innovative prose poem works. His poetry has…