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Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 - "From you have I been absent in the spring," | 1:06The Insane Artist | 24K subscribers | 2,472 views | March 15, 2020

A South African anthropologist has asked permission to open the graves of William Shakespeare and his family to determine, among other things, what killed the Bard and whether his poems and plays may have been composed under the influence of marijuana. But while Shakespeare's skeleton could reveal clues about his health and death, the question of the man's drug use depends on the presence of hair, fingernails or toenails in the grave, said Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who floated the proposal to the Church of England. Thackeray...

Actors don’t need to share the ‘lived experience’ of their characters.The Globe Theatre in London has come under fire for a supposedly controversial casting choice. Last week, it was announced that Michelle Terry, who is also the Globe’s artistic director, would be taking on the titular role in Shakespeare’s Richard III later this summer. Outrage immediately ensued. Because according to identitarian activists, Terry doesn’t have the ‘lived experience’ needed to play the scheming king.Certainly, there are some pretty glaring differences between Michelle Terry and Richard III. For one thing, Terry is a woman and Richard, obviously, was a man. But...

Randy Meisner - Take It To The Limit | 4:19CaliforniaMusic Dream | 289 subscribers | 37,896 views | February 18, 2018

Origin of Et Tu, Brute “Et Tu, Brute?” are perhaps the most popular three words ever written, uttered in literature, and then quoted in different contexts. This phrase also comes from the genius of Shakespeare. It occurs in his play, Julius Caesar, (Act-III, Scene-I, Lines, 77). Julius Caesar utters this phrase as his last words, addressing his close friend, Brutus, in the play. However, the history does not seem to support this, as it is a widely debated subject among historians and dramatists alike. Like so many other countless phrases, Shakespeare vouchsafed this phrase an everlasting life after using it...

I'm a Little Dinosaur (Live) | 2:07Jonathan Richman - Topic | 3.63K subscribers | 951 views | May 5, 2022

High school English teachers today face prison in Florida if they have their class perform a Shakespeare play in period dress. Every Shakespeare play at the Globe required cross-dressing.Women were not allowed on English stages 400 years ago, so women’s roles were played by cross-dressing men, whether at The Globe, the Blackfriars or, what was it called? O, yeah, the Roxy. This led to the delightful scene in “The Merchant of Venice” in which Portia, played by a cross-dressing man, criss-cross-dresses as a woman playing a man, to save his/her/its friend’s friend Antonio. Right: a man playing a woman playing...

As part of its annual “Broadway’s Best” lineup, Great Performances raises the curtain this spring on Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of “Richard III “ Premiering Friday, May 19 at 9 Starring Danai Gurira (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “The Walking Dead”) in the title role

The Ides of March—a day of murder that forever changed history ​The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C still resonates as a day of infamy. Here's how the plot unfolded.Julius Caesar's bloody assassination on March 15, 44 B.C., forever marked March 15, or the Ides of March, as a day of infamy. It has fascinated scholars and writers ever since. For ancient Romans living before that event, however, an ides was merely one of several common calendar terms used to mark monthly lunar events. The ides simply marked the appearance of the full moon. But Romans would soon learn...

Director Holly Teti explores “heterotopia” in an outdoor staging of the Scottish playAudience members lounged on picnic blankets or folding chairs as the action unfolded against the University Chapel, framed by falling flower petals, twisting tree branches and a slow, golden sunset.“Double, double, toil and trouble…” the University’s student-run theatre organization Shakespeare on the Lawn mounted a powerful production of “Macbeth” in Pavilion Garden I this weekend, bringing one of the Bard’s greatest tragedies to Grounds for a three-afternoon run. Audience members lounged on picnic blankets or folding chairs as the action unfolded against the University Chapel, framed by...

[snip] Joey Cook is back! Check out what we did with Cage The Elephant's "Ain't No Rest For The Wicked" from Borderland, also starring clarinetist Jacob Scesney doing a bit of decorating. [/snip]Ain't No Rest For The WickedVintage Jazz | Cage The Elephant Cover ft. Joey CookPostmodernJukebox | 5.86M subscribers7,366,351 views | January 12, 2017

It is often said that, given an infinite amount of time, monkeys hitting random keys on a typewriter will eventually type the works of Shakespeare. While it may seem far fetched, an unusual experiment has achieved the fabled task. To illustrate how paralysed people can type using a device called a ‘brain-computer interface’, scientists used monkeys to show how it can be done. Two rhesus macaque monkeys (stock picture) typed a passage from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as portions of the New York Times, at 12 words per minute.

There's something quite satisfying about the infinite monkey therorem, which goes like this: an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters would one day produce the entire works of Shakespeare, really showing that smug dead genius what's what. It's not just the works of Shakespeare, of course. Given enough time and monkeys, eventually, they'd write everything, including the above sentences. Please note that if you are typing up a monkey copy of this article from far in the future we'll sue. We're not above suing a monkey, Donkey Kong, and will see you in space court....

Vive la différence between British and French culture in two of the greatest playwrights in history. Britain has a rich literary heritage, but Shakespeare, "the Bard," is widely recognized as the greatest writer in the English language. In France, a number of writers — Voltaire, Hugo, Proust, Flaubert — can compete for that title, but Molière is viewed as the most acclaimed writer of French comedy and satires, even more heralded than later satirists like Voltaire and Anatole France.This year, specifically January 15, 1622, is the 400th anniversary of the birth in the heart of Paris of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, son...

For the second year running the pandemic has halted Shakespeare’s Birthday Parade – although see below for details of the virtual one. While we are missing the fun, Sylvia Morris looks back on the history of the parade which has been an annual feature of the town since 1826. SHAKESPEARE’S Birthday has been celebrated in Stratford-upon-Avon for very nearly two centuries. Over this period there have been many changes, but the floral procession from the centre of the town to Holy Trinity Church remains their central feature. It is headed by students from King Edward VI School because the school...

The bust, which shows the Bard with moustache and goatee, was believed to have been installed several years after his death in 1616, meaning it was likely not an accurate likeness.But now expert Professor Lena Cowen Orlin has said it was 'highly likely' that Shakespeare commissioned the monument, which could have been modelled from life by a sculptor who knew him.How Shakespeare really looked has been a matter of debate because of uncertainty around the reliability of existing portraits of him.Along with the effigy, the only work which definitively depicts him is the engraving which appears on the title page...

When Mary Chater’s husband, the Rumpole of the Bailey actor Julian Curry, died last June, a friend recommended that she should read the speech in King John in which the widowed Constance laments the loss of her young son. “ ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child/Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me’,” quotes Chater who, like her husband, is a former RSC actor. “ ‘My life, my joy, my food, my all the world’. I’ve never read or said out loud words that so chimed with my emotions, especially immediately after Julian died. I...

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...

From a disease standpoint, Shakespeare was living in arguably the worst place and time in history. Shakespeare's overcrowded, rat-infested, sexually promiscuous London, with raw sewage flowing in the Thames, was the hub for the nastiest diseases known to mankind. Here are the worst of the worst. 1. Plague It is little surprise that the plague was the most dreaded disease of Shakespeare's time. Carried by fleas living on the fur of rats, the plague swept through London in 1563, 1578-9, 1582, 1592-3, and 1603 (Singman, 52). The outbreaks in 1563 and 1603 were the most ferocious, each wiping out over...

William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, could fetch between $4 million and $6 million at an upcoming auction at Christie’s New York. The book was published in 1623 by his friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell after Shakespeare died in 1616 at age 52. Containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio is the first authoritative collection of his plays and ranks as one of the greatest works of world literature. The copy was offered for sale from the collection of Mills College in Oakland, Calif. It’s one of only six complete...