Apr 29, 2019
Whether it’s Lear calling Goneril a plague-sore, or Mercutio cursing the families in Romeo and Juliet by saying “A plague on both your houses!” Shakespeare’s works testify to the fact that rampant plague was a very real, and very prevalent, part of Shakespeare's daily life. But what were the concerns about...
Apr 22, 2019
We are celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday this week by taking a look at how Shakespeare became a gentleman. One of the ways William Shakespeare achieved the status of a gentleman was in the procurement of the family Coat of Arms. This process was something of a mystery because history shows us that Shakespeare’s...
Apr 15, 2019
Several of Shakespeare’s history plays, and even some of his comedies mention or refer to characters as a knight. Sometimes knights are good, other times they are bad, and sometimes we aren’t quite sure what they are as is often the case with characters like Falstaff. However, what’s true is that an armored knight...
Apr 8, 2019
For William Shakespeare, the Globe theater itself represented a place that brought together a mix of classes. People from high society, all the way down the poorest of the poor observed Shakespeare’s plays, but how much of the bard’s work acknowledged the poor and what was the reality of charitable giving going...
Apr 1, 2019
When William Shakespeare was writing The Tempest was he considering the light bouncing off the walls of his playhouse? When he directed Feste to be fond of singing in Twelfth Night, did Shakespeare know the people in the back would be able to hear him?
We don’t often think about Shakespeare’s plays in context of...