Poster for Merry Wives of Windsor It was a wonderful coincidence when Shakespeare’s Globe posted their 2025 summer season, because they were doing Merry Wives of Windsor, which I had already decided to teach for my Literary London course. This followed them doing Richard III in 2024, while I was teaching that play. It was …
Continue reading William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor—5 July 2025
Poster for Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of those plays that is incredibly famous, but also quite easy to hate: because so many of us are forced to read it in school, because so many people think of this story of teenage angst and suicide as the ultimate love story, even …
Continue reading William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—29 June 2025
Me with the Richard III poster at the Globe As part of a Literary London study abroad course on crime and justice in British literature, I assigned William Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was a marvelous bit of serendipity that Shakespeare’s Globe was putting on that very show while we visited London. Even before the Globe …
Continue reading William Shakespeare’s Richard III—8 June 2024
Sonnetfest ’21, directed by Kevin Wetmore, introduced Shakespeare’s sonnets as fourteen-line plays, and that promise was borne out. The performance consists of several sonnets read (not in numerical order) and acted out by Loyola Marymount University’s College of Communications and Fine Arts. I watched the final performance, which was streamed over YouTube-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsHyQUA0hK0 (this link …
Continue reading Sonnetfest ’21: 4th Annual Shakespeare on the Bluff Festival—23 July 2021
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, perhaps surprisingly for people who don’t know the play, not really about Caesar, it’s about Brutus and his struggle with the decision to be drawn into the conspiracy to murder the increasingly imperial Caesar in the hopes of restoring a free Roman Republic. And then once the murder is committed, he …
Continue reading Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare–2 Nov. 2019
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is one of his oddest plays. It’s essentially divided between two halves, the one set in the court of Sicily and the other in the pastoral idyll of Bohemia. The first half is a psychological portrait of paranoia, violence, and oppressive patriarchy, and the second half blends rustic charm with redemptive …
Continue reading The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare–27 Mar. 2019
The American Shakespeare Center’s travelling troupe is consistently excellent, and their production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Jemma Alix Levy, lived up to that high standard. The ASC’s distinctive performance ethos is one of the major factors in their success. Their performance style is a blend of the modern and the Elizabethan, …
Continue reading The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare–3 Dec. 2017
Shakespeare’s (and Wilkin’s) Pericles, Prince of Tyre is one of my favorite plays, but it doesn’t get performed that often, so it was an absolute treat to see the play not only done, but done fantastically well by West Virginia University’s Theatre Department. The production, directed by Cornel Gabara, was well acted, visually stunning, and …
Continue reading Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins–17 Mar. 2017
This is the fourth, maybe fifth show I’ve seen the Rustic Mechanicals perform, and this is the first one I would say was really good. My major critique of the Mechanicals has been the tendency to painfully overact, but with this cast and for this show, they (largely) resisted that tendency. For the first time …
Continue reading The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare–9 Oct. 2016
As everyone knows, Romeo & Juliet is the greatest love story ever told. Officially. Of course, the reality of the play is slightly less romantic and more teen suicide-y, but such is life. Or death, in Romeo and Juliet’s case. One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, Romeo & Juliet tells the story of two young …
Continue reading Romeo & Juliet, by William Shakespeare–17 July 2016
Phillip Zapkin 