The Shakespeare Newsletter

12/19/2025

The next issue will be published before long so it is time to subscribe if you are not a subscriber or to renew if it is renewal time. Here is the link to do both of those.

12/01/2025

FOUND ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE!
An Ellis cartoon.

11/17/2025

FOUND ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE!
A panel by Ellis.

11/16/2025

FOUND ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE!
George Herriman, BARON BEAN, 23 March 1917.

09/26/2025

FOUND ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE!
Justin H. Howard. A political cartoon from the 1864 presidential campaign. Democratic nominee General George McClellan ran against incumbent Abraham Lincoln. McClellan is Hamlet, Lincoln is Yorick's skull. I am not able to identify the two gravediggers. Please let me know if you know.

09/15/2025

Today is the last day to enroll in Shakespeare Association of America seminars and workshops for the 2026 Annual Meeting in Denver, CO (April 1-4). If not already committed, please consider my seminar, details in this photo from the SAA Newsletter. Contact me at [email protected] with questions.

09/13/2025

FOUND ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE!
George Herriman, KRAZY KAT, August 22 1934. "Hark hark a lark" is the title of a song in Shakespeare's play CYMBELINE, but Herriman is probably referring to the pop song with that title popular in the thirties. The pop song almost certainly was inspired by Shakespeare, but Herriman probably wasn't. On the other hand, the title of this daily comes from JULIUS CAESAR.

09/05/2025

Mary Z. Maher has died.

Prof. Maher was emerita at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After teaching there for many, many years, Mary moved to Ashland, Oregon and became an important part of the local community of Shakespeare scholars. She called a monthly Shakes-beer at a local pub for us to gather and talk. While there was no agenda, you put Mary, Alan Armstrong, Geoff Ridden, Lue Douthit, Don Weingust, and me at the same table and Shakespeare will come up a lot. This helped a newcomer, me, get to know some great people.

Mary wrote some wonderful books.
Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies, Iowa, 1992
Actor Nicholas Pennell: Risking Enchantment, PublishAmerica, 2005
Actors Talk About Shakespeare, Limelight, 2009
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Actors: Telling the Story, Alan Armstrong, co-author, Wellstone, 2014

09/05/2025

Another of the free articles that even non-subscribers may access, Lois Potter's review of the National Theatre's CORIOLANUS.

Coriolanus at The National Theatre

08/27/2025

Here is one of the free articles in the new SHAKESPEARE NEWSLETTER. Kelly O'Connor is a superb observer of live theater.

The Merry Wives of Windsor RSC July 2024

08/09/2025

The new issue of Shakespeare Newsletter has been published. The double-issue includes 3 book reviews on early modern studies, 5 theatre reviews, and 3 reprinted articles. Here are the details.

Books Reviewed
Darren Freebury-Jones’s Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd
Sujata Ivengar’s Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory
Robert Darcy’s Misanthropoetics: Social Flight and Literary Form in Early Modern England

Performance Reviews
King Lear at the Shed’s Griffin Theater, directed by Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh, and Lucy Skilbeck
The Merry Wives of Windsor at the RSC, directed by Blanche McIntyre
Coriolanus at The National Theatre, directed by Lyndsey Turner
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Collaborative Theatre Project, directed by Susan Aversa
And a review/essay about Shakespeare productions in the Rogue Valley, Oregon, that includes the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Reprinted Articles
Upstairs, Downstairs in Merry Wives (49.4, Winter 1999/2000), by George Walton Williams
Review of Periodicals (55.4 Winter 2005/2006), by Grace Tiffany
Kristina Bedford’s “Coriolanus” at The National (42.4, Winter 1992,) by David George
The archival articles are available to non-subscribers.

Subscribers may read everything now. Ohers may subscribe by going to the following link. At just $25 per year, SHAKESPEARE NEWSLETTER is one of the best bargains in academia.

07/29/2025

Here is a second posting of this Call For Papers.
Audio Shakespeare Around the World

The Shakespeare International Yearbook will publish a special issue on audio Shakespeare around the world: histories of recorded, radio, and streaming global Shakespeare productions from early phonographic recordings to the latest Internet audio productions. We are looking for international scholars with diverse backgrounds to research and document these performances. While audio works in the English-speaking countries of the northern hemisphere are well documented, those in the southern hemisphere are not, nor are performances in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, other Eastern European languages, Spanish, Japanese, various Chinese dialects, various Indian dialects, and any other languages not listed here.

We hope you will contribute to this most understudied area of Shakespeare performance studies. Please contact special issue editor Mike Jensen at [email protected]

The Shakespeare International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies across the whole spectrum of his literary output and afterlife in world cultures. New trends are evaluated from the point of view of established scholarship, and emerging work in the field is encouraged, to present a view of what is happening all around the world. Each volume includes a special section under the guidance of a specialist Guest Editor. Alexa Alice Joubin is the general editor.