For Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human, the Bastard, Faulconbridge, is one of Shakespeare’s first truly ‘Shakespearean’ characters, because with this character Shakespeare was not trying to emulate Christopher Marlowe’s rhetoric from Tamburlaine but drawing on ‘nature’ and reality for inspiration. As a result, Faulconbridge is the […]
In 1899, the great Victorian theatre director Herbert Beerbohm Tree made a short silent film to promote his forthcoming stage production of William Shakespeare’s history play, The Life and Death of King John. This short piece of silent cinema included footage of King John’s dying moments, along with three other […]
‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle’: so begins probably the most famous speech from Richard II, William Shakespeare’s 1590s history play about the fall of the Plantagenet king. These words are spoken by the dying John of Gaunt, and the phrases he uses – from ‘this royal throne […]