Last weekend, I had the dubious pleasure of attending the world premiere of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous at the invitation of a German TV journalist who wanted to interview me about the film. His painstakingly neutral report aired yesterday; thanks to artful editing, I can be seen and heard being far too nice about […]
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Another tiny postscript to the Stephen Marche piece. Here he is in the Paris Review today (thanks to Nicholas Morris for the heads-up):
When I think about other writers, I probably remember their lives more clearly at first than their work—Hemingway in Paris, Joyce in Trieste, all that junk. With Shakespeare, there just […]
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It would be nice to start this post with a semi-snappy line like “Stephen Marche has written a monumentally stupid book about Shakespeare” or “How Shakespeare Changed Everything may be the most ignorant book about Shakespeare published this century.” Neither statement would be inaccurate, exactly. But Marche’s book is so preposterous in its […]
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In a piece published on Ology.com, John Kurzynowski portrays Shakespeare as the founding father of a tradition of collaborative play-making that still thrives in experimental theatre. I don’t think he’s right, and in some ways he’s quite clearly wrong, but at least what he’s saying isn’t anywhere near as silly as […]
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My forthcoming book as word cloud (via Wordle; click for full-size image):
Having just finished the index, I think this looks like a pretty accurate summary. “Mediation” and “performance” could perhaps be bigger, and I’m surprised Shakespeare and especially Jonson aren’t more prominent, but it’s true that “authority” […]
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If you spend your life working on Shakespeare, sooner or later someone’s going to pop the question: “Did he really write the plays?”
If you are a serious, textual-studies minded Shakespearean, you might respond with something along these lines: “Well. Probably not all of them on his own. He only collaborated on 1 Henry VI, and […]
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If The Guardian and around 4000 other Google hits are to be believed, the inspiration for Ophelia’s death in Hamlet has been found: a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who drowned in a pond while picking marigolds in 1569, five years after Shakespeare’s birth, in a Worcestershire village a day’s ride from Stratford.
The […]
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This is the first post in what will doubtless be a dismayingly long series of occasional rants.
Via Grace Ioppolo on Twitter, here’s Simon Schama in The Observer:
“Shakespeare is in the unique position of speaking universally while not losing any of the intensity of the language of where he comes from,” said […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.