By Hannah Furness for The Telegraph, 17 October 2015 He was master of the pithy put down, the romantic sonnet and the dramatic plot twists to capture the public imagination for the last 450 years. But his talents did not end there. For Shakespeare, widely acknowledged the greatest playwright in the history of the English language, was also an expert amateur […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Anita Singh for The Telegraph, 6 October 2015 The Barbican is to stage a Shakespeare season next year to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death. New productions include King Lear set in the Australian outback and a radical adaptation melding Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III into one modern-day play, Kings of War. But the quirkiest offering is Table […]
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