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A London theatre has added a ‘trigger warning’ to its production of William Shakespeare’s 415-year-old play Macbeth. The Almeida Theatre in London includes this “content warning”: “This production includes extreme scenes of violence, including violence against children, suicide, and the use of blood, firearms and knives. It also contains flashing lights, vaping and the smoking of real cigarettes.” It further directed viewers to the Samaritans suicide charity “if you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this production” of the over-400-year-old play, which as The Times noted, is considered suitable for children and often taught in school...

The last thing I want, emerging on the other side of social distancing, is to feel I could have done more with my time. Plus my show has 11 seasonsMy first week in self-isolation was a flurry of enterprise and initiative. I don’t mean to boast, but it’s astonishing how much I managed to get done. My biggest achievement? I watched almost half a season of the hit Australian competitive-cooking, reality-TV show My Kitchen Rules, a dozen 60-minute episodes, devoured as ravenously as a vegemite buffet. Of course, this demanded commitment and intractable resolve, and there were more than a...

Sir Derek Jacobi is wrong to think that Shakespeare could not have written his own plays; the greatest poet and dramatist of all times was an Englishman and a CatholicThe actor Sir Derek Jacobi is currently acting the part of King Lear to great critical acclaim at the Donmar Warehouse. I must get to see it before the production closes just to see if he gets my personal imprimatur or not. But there is one matter on which I cannot agree with Sir Derek: the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Apparently the knighted thespian takes a benighted view on this one:...

Veteran actor Brian Blessed collapsed on stage with an apparent heart problem while playing King Lear. The 78-year-old had just started delivering his lines at the start of the Shakespearean tragedy when he fainted, toppled off a raised platform and fell heavily, his crown rolling to a halt at the front of the stage. Fellow actor Noel White, playing the Earl of Kent, announced quietly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is not part of the play. Is there a doctor in the house?’ Indeed there was. A barely conscious Mr Blessed, flat on his back and surrounded by worried cast members...

The Rev. John Becker, S.J., sat at the front of the classroom, paperback in hand, glasses pushed to the end of his nose. As he spoke, he looked intently from one student to another. “This semester, I am going to teach you how to read 'King Lear,'” he said. “It may be Shakespeare’s most difficult play. But it has a powerful message to tell.” When we were done reading “Lear,” the priest promised, we would not only understand it, but we would have learned the secret of understanding any thing written in English -- anything, that is, with a meaning...

Jan Schill has a message for voters in Oklahoma choosing a district judge in elections on Tuesday -- do not vote for my dad. She and her husband have taken out newspaper ads urging voters not to vote for John Mantooth, who they believe had a lousy record as a judge and does not deserve the job.

Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven’t succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly. Not, of course, that that puts doctors off, far from it. Nineteenth-century mad doctors in Britain and America said Lear’s case was...

Attacking” President Bush November 27, 2003 “Some are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,” says a new Republican TV ad for President Bush. In its verbal sloppiness, this message is fully worthy of the president himself. Of course nobody is “attacking” him in the same sense that he is “attacking the terrorists,” with real bullets and bombs. Various people are criticizing him, some with measured language, some with verbal abuse, but all of them are well within the limits of the “freedom” and “democracy” he says he wants to promote around the world. So why does he allow and...

"Compassion” and Talk Radio October 16, 2003 As I noted the other day, I almost feel I never knew what hate really was until I saw the liberal reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s drug problem. The Germans have a word for this sort of spiteful glee in others’ suffering, but it’s hard to spell and you probably know it anyway. What makes this gloating insufferable is that so many of the guy’s ill-wishers add the pious wish that his miseries will teach him to be a more “compassionate person.” You know, like them. Well, maybe it will. When King Lear foolishly...

Tolstoy’s pamphlets are the least-known part of his work, and his attack on Shakespeare 1 is not even an easy document to get hold of, at any rate in an English translation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be useful if I give a summary of the pamphlet before trying to discuss it.Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him “an irresistible repulsion and tedium.” Conscious that the opinion of the civilized world is against him, he has made one attempt after another on Shakespeare’s works, reading and re-reading them in Russian, English and German; but “I invariably...