Post Tagged with: "James Shapiro"

The world’s the stage: Shakespeare’s rise to global pre-eminence

By Jerry Brotton for the Financial Times, 30 December 2015 Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe, by Andrew Dickson, Bodley Head, RRP£20, 512 pages Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, by Emma Smith, OUP, RRP£19.99, 328 pages The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, RRP£18.99/RRP$29.99, 386 pages 1606: William Shakespeare and […]

January 9, 2016 · 0 comments · Reviews
Shakespeare in Modern English?

Shakespeare in Modern English?

By James Shapiro for The New York Times, 7 October 2015 THE Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. Many in the theater community have known that this day was coming, […]

October 15, 2015 · 0 comments · Uncategorized
Why We (Mostly) Stopped Messing With Shakespeare’s Language

Why We (Mostly) Stopped Messing With Shakespeare’s Language

By Daniel Pollack-Peizner for The New Yorker, 6 October 2015 Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain […]

October 15, 2015 · 0 comments · Uncategorized
Nowhere man: the challenges of tracking down Shakespeare

Nowhere man: the challenges of tracking down Shakespeare

By Germaine Greer for NewStatesman, 6 October 2015 Having had a great success in 2005 with 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro has provided his many admirers with an account of another year, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. Literary biography is a tricky genre, and not made more straightforward by slicing it into year-long […]

October 15, 2015 · 0 comments · Uncategorized