To b-day, or not to b-day: what a piece of work is Shakespeare

[Extract] In William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the conspirator Cassius bitterly describes the position of Caesar in Rome. He says: … [H]e doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. While written about Caesar, these words are a rather prophetic description of Shakespeare, whose birthday falls today. William Shakespeare occupies a very similar space: a towering literary colossus, he remains both admired and – to some extent – feared. We mere mortals – we petty men and women – walk humbly in his shadow, in wonder and (sometimes) in confusion

Review: The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s comedy of cruelty

[Extract] The Merchant of Venice (first published in 1600) boasts a problematic and sometimes controversial stage history. During the second world war, Hitler’s “Reichsdramaturg” Rainer Schlösser organised a highly edited version of the play. In it, Shylock’s daughter Jessica was altered to his foster daughter to prevent German actresses from playing Jewish characters (for more, see John Drakakis’ Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice). Far more recently, in 2012 the Globe Theatre in London featured a Hebrew performance by Israel’s Habima National Theatre. Demonstrators protested during the performances (read more about both the performance and the protests here and in this review)

From Abigall to Zenocrate: Patterns of learning and change in Marlowe’s women

Scholarships & Prizes Office. University of Sydne

Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet reviewed: the same great themes in some strange new haunts

[Extract] Today, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play that haunts itself. Its saturation into cultural consciousness means that watching a performance is inevitably a process of past ghosts and past echoes framing the current performance. Like the Ghost of old Hamlet’s invocation to “Remember me”, we cannot help but remember Hamlet: it is iconic

Tropic of Shakespeare: what studying Macbeth in Queensland could teach us about place and shipwrecks

[Extract] When you imagine the setting for Macbeth, misty heaths, battlefields, and the brooding highlands spring to mind. Teaching the play in the midst of a tropical summer in Townsville, far north Queensland, highlights disjunctions and surprising correlations between play and place. In their 2011 book Ecocritical Shakespeare, Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton consider this relationship between our environment and our practices of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare: What does the study of literature have to do with the environment? … What is the connection between the literary and the real when it comes to ecological conduct, both in Shakespeare's era and now? One way of answering these questions is through the use of place-based education. Educational theorists Amanda Hagood and Carmel E. Price reason that "student learning is enhanced when course content is grounded in a particular place of meaning"

Vivacious and unapologetic, The Rover's 17th-century feminism is painfully pertinent

The Rover, now on at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney, starts unexpectedly, with long-dead 17th-century playwright Aphra Behn walking onstage – staring down the audience in a gawdy gold gown, beverage in hand, vivacious and unapologetic. She challenges us to accept a play by a female playwright: Men are but Bunglers, when they wou'd express The sweets of Love, the dying tenderness; But Women, by their own abundance, measure, And when they write, have deeper sense of Pleasure. She then exhorts those in the audience who do not like the prospect of a female playwright to, in her words, "fuck off". When nobody chooses to do so, Behn allows the play to start. Under the direction of Eamon Flack, this irreverent, hilarious production deftly offers Behn's work in a way that is accessible, clever and utterly relevant

Hugo Weaving reveals Macbeth's weakness – and his unhappiness

[Extract] Sydney Theatre Company's new production of Macbeth may draw attention for its star, Hugo Weaving, but the most powerful agent of this production is the theatrical space. Director Kip Williams has inverted the traditional theatre space: audience members enter through one side door and take their rather uncomfortable seats on what would be the stage/backstage of the theatre. In the program notes, Williams claims that "it is space that has conjured story". We stare directly out at where we should be sitting: the stalls and balcony seats are empty, dimly lit and haunting. The vacant chairs are like dull eyes watching us, and their emptiness pre-empts the empty chair later in the play that the ghost of Banquo does and does not occupy (depending on who can see him)

Henry V meets the London Blitz and brings the house down

[Extract] Bell Shakespeare’s new production of William Shakespeare’s Henry V – which opened in Canberra on June 14 – interrogates the complexities of war through a unique framing device: its scenes are played out by schoolchildren taking refuge during another conflict – the second world war. In this creative production, the English invasion of France and the famous battle of Agincourt are“ crammed” into the confines of an unglamourous classroom. There are old wooden bookshelves, a blackboard, piles of books

Review: love and war in All’s Well That Ends Well

[Extract] Love is a battlefield. While Pat Benatar might have made this line her own in the 1980s, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also familiar with the trope. Analogies between wooing and hunting were rife in early modern sonnets and plays. In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, love and war collide. In Sport for Jove’s current production, playing at Sydney’s Seymour Centre until April 12, Helena’s unrequited love for her social superior Bertram sends him flying into the heat of battle to avoid love

“Tongues in trees”: reimagining the regions through pastoral place-based pedagogy

This essay uses the pastoral conjured in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It to reflect on the experience of teaching Shakespeare in regional far north Queensland. By aligning the pastoral with the concept of the ‘region’, the essay negotiates the complex relationship between a sense of lived place and the literary places imagined and constructed in the texts we encounter in our teaching, writing, and research. The explicit connection of these two places – regional and pastoral – will prove mutually enlightening as the discussion works towards a framework for enabling students to incorporate a sense of place in literary studies through the concept of ardenspace. This discussion will draw on place-based learning in order to examine the way our senses of literary and regional place are imaginatively constructed and how this affects – and can be utilised in – research, writing, and teaching