Writer's Digest

1 min read

Sarah Smith grew up in Atlanta and graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with highest honors in English and creative writing. She moved to Argentina after school, then to New York City “with a holey air mattress, a suitcase, and no job,” she says. “I love i

The Millions

7 min read

Shakespeare was often handmaid to the subjugation of people by English colonialists, who used the playwright as evidence of British superiority, while at the same time he was used by people across Africa in their own striving for national self-determ

The Guardian

3 min read

From Ophelia to Desdemona, female characters obey tired stereotypes. This TV series will bring a new perspective

History Revealed

1 min read

37 The number of (known) plays written by William Shakespeare 410 The average number of professional productions of Shakespeare every year between 1959 and 2015, according to the World Shakespeare Bibliography £120 The rough cost of the new famil

The Atlantic

3 min read

Ira Glass recently admitted that he is not all that into Shakespeare, explaining that Shakespeare's plays are "not relatable [and are] unemotional." This caused a certain amount of incredulity and horror—but The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg too

The Christian Science Monitor

3 min read

As in all the best historical fiction, readers will come away with a seminar's-worth of historical knowledge without feeling like they did any heavy lifting.

TIME

1 min read

WILL, TNT’S NEW DRAMA ABOUT A young playwright (played by Laurie Davidson), is a show in which people say things like, “Who will want a play by William Shakespeare?” The speaker, here, is his wife, Anne (Deirdre Mullins), when he is leaving her in St

Los Angeles Times

4 min read

Plagiarism is impossible to avoid. Unless you speak glossolalicly - "in tongues" - your words, phrases and systems of metaphor are not your private inventions. And if you've found yourself saying "cuck" or "double down" or "take a knee" in the last y

History Revealed

1 min read

Shakespeare begins his career as a collaborative dramatist and works on three plays about Henry VI. He is called an “upstart crow” in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. His name first appears in print with the publication of his highly popular and erotic p

History Revealed

1 min read

Have you ever had ‘too much of a good thing’, or been told that you have a ‘heart of gold’? These, along with many other phrases and words, were first used or invented by William Shakespeare (1564–1616). More than four centuries after his death, the

The Atlantic

5 min read

A new film by Kenneth Branagh is a textbook case of how portraitists of the bard spin a paucity of fact into fairy tale.

History Revealed

4 min read

In Shakespeare’s time, playwriting was a matter of both perspiration and inspiration. First he had to think up a story, which he would shape into a plot. Usually this meant he had to do a lot of fresh reading, because most of Shakespeare’s plays are

The Christian Science Monitor

3 min read

Stuart Kells explores the source materials that would have been necessary to write all those plays and poems.

The Christian Science Monitor

2 min read

An epic immigration story that flows like poetry, a kid-friendly adaptation of Shakespeare, and more great audiobooks made our list this month.

The Atlantic

2 min read

Writing is sometimes seen as a solitary pursuit, but co-authors, editors, and friends enrich the process: Your weekly guide to the best in books

Antique Trader

1 min read

For the first time in two decades, a complete and original copy of Shakespeare’s first printed collection of plays hit the market. And The Bard’s work made quite an impression. Published in 1623 and referred to as the First Folio, Shakespeare’s colle

Writer's Digest

2 min read

Enjoy a full day of intense instruction at this “How to Get Published” writing event sponsored by Writing Day Workshops in Culver City. WHEN: May 2, 2020. WHERE: DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Los Angeles, Westside, Culver City, Calif. PRICE: $189 regi

The Atlantic

3 min read

Shakespeare, despite being perhaps the best-known writer in the English language, is a tricky figure to pin down. A new film about the playwright and poet’s life offers just one of many fictional interpretations of his biography. Meanwhile, a heated

The Christian Science Monitor

3 min read

The Shakespeare canon undergoes scrutiny, turning up links to Thomas North. But ‘plagiarism’ was more the rule than the exception for Elizabethans.

Foreign Policy Magazine

4 min read

Shakespeare may never have left England, but he became the most global writer who ever lived.

History Revealed

2 min read

Maggie O'Farrell is the author of eight novels and a memoir. Her 2016 novel This Must Be The Place was shortlisted for a Costa Book Award and two of her previous novels have won this prize. Hamnet is her first novel set pre-20th century. What inspir

Harper's Bazaar Australia

1 min read

It’s easy to attribute the appeal of a short story to our ever-waning attention spans, or the lack of free time to consume anything longer than a couple of thousand words. But moral panic aside, there’s always been something joyous about the fleeting

Literary Hub

7 min read

What did Shakespeare believe? We can only guess. He left neither a diary nor a philosophical treatise. His only recorded words are devoted to business transactions and legal cases. His only surviving letters are conventional, if supremely elegantly p

TIME

1 min read

Technically he’s not our bard, but you wouldn’t know it from the performances that light up the American landscape every summer. How did a playwright who died four years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth give rise to an annual tradition of outdo

India Today

1 min read

Q The title of your upcoming novel, A Secret History of Compassion, has us intrigued. Can you tell us what's it about? A. It's the name of the essay that Lord Spider, a writer of popular fiction, and J.L. Pillai, executioner, aspiring writer and voye

AMERICAN THEATRE

5 min read

PROFESSION: Director and producer HOMETOWN: Born in Miami, raised in Los Angeles CURRENT HOME: Los Angeles KNOWN FOR: Cisneros recently received a Leadership U: One-on-One grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by Theatre C

North & South

2 min read

by Carol Markwell The Cuba Press — $40 Although not unknown to students of early European New Zealand literature, the name of Blanche Baughan is likely to be unfamiliar outside academe. A few general readers may be aware that her poetry was sanctifie

frankie Magazine

5 min read

SHAKESPEARE DIDN’T WRITE HIS OWN PLAYS No individual has had a more pronounced effect upon English language and culture than William Shakespeare. This isn’t an opinion, it’s an objective fact: the guy single-handedly invented around 1700 words, from

NPR

3 min read

In his new book, Richard Rhodes lays out an accessible and surprisingly optimistic history of energy by exploring the lives of scientists and inventors — and a few unlikely people, like Bard of Avon.

Country Life

5 min read

IS there music in Shakespeare? In every line that he wrote, in numerous songs and in limitless characters’ mouths and ears. Orsino calls for it in Twelfth Night, considering it ‘the food of love’; in Hamlet, Ophelia sings her way to a watery death; a