By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Although it was first performed in the 1590s, the first documented performance of Romeo and Juliet is from 1662. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the audience, and recorded that he ‘saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do.’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Macbeth is, along with the character of Iago in Othello and his earlier portrayal of Richard III, William Shakespeare’s most powerful exploration and analysis of evil.
Although we can find precursors to Macbeth in the murderer-turned-conscience-stricken-men of Shakespeare’s earlier plays – notably the conspirator Brutus in Julius Caesar and Claudius in Hamlet – Macbeth provides us with a closer and more complex examination of how a brave man with everything going for him might be corrupted by ambition and goading into committing an act of murder.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In a previous post, we have offered a short plot summary of The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and his final solo work for the theatre. As we remarked then, The Tempest is essentially a fantasy story (or ‘romance’ to use the term that tends to be used to categorise The Tempest) featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, treachery and conspiracy, drunkenness, fairies, a lavish masque, young lovers, and much else. How should we go about interpreting Shakespeare’s last solo work for the theatre? Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting and enchanted plays: a fantasy or ‘romance’ featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, fairies, a lavish masque, drunken conspirators, young lovers, and much else.
Before we say more about these individual elements (which demand separate blog posts at some later date), it might be worth offering a brief summary of The Tempest – one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, and widely regarded as his ‘farewell to the theatre’.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle travels to Elizabethan England for Robert Greene’s comedy
Robert Greene is probably best-known, in the British popular consciousness at least, for two things. The first is for (supposedly) penning what was perhaps the first, and one of the most memorable, philippics against William Shakespeare: as he lay dying, Greene attacked the Stratford playwright as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country.’