mother i am slain

Siblings Lupita and Junior Nyong'o playing Viola and Sebastian woah 🤯

Princes and counties! Surely, a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count Comfect; a sweet gallant, surely! O that I were a man for his sake! or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into courtesies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too:

He mentioned Palestine in Othello

Othello was published in 1622, thats 401 years ago

four hundred one years ago

"I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

brb I'm stealing his gender

Toheeb Jimoh as Romeo and Isis Hainsworth as Juliet in the Almeida Theater’s new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Credit: Marc Brenner

…this production from Rebecca Frecknall — the buzzy British director whose shows tend to scoop up Olivier awards — treats the often overly familiar play as if it were entirely fresh, and the result is astonishing.

…Her “Romeo and Juliet,” performed without an intermission, begins with the cast clawing feverishly at a stage wall, onto which are projected crucial lines from the prologue. But as if in haste to get straight to the meat of the play, the wall soon collapses to reveal the citizenry of Verona mid-combat. Danger, you feel from the start, is the default mode of a contemporary-seeming milieu amid which Juliet is described by her father as “a stranger in the world.” That is perhaps because she hasn’t yet experienced life’s abrasions; such an awareness will come — and how — with time.

Much Ado About Nothing

Royal Shakespeare Company, 2022

Dir. Roy Alexander Weise

Although James dreaded witches, he and parliament sought to protect heathland as a habitat for game animals and birds. He would have relished Shakespeare’s comparing Macbeth to a poacher and a kite, a species then classified as vermin. Macbeth’s killing of Duncan and Macduff’s (pronounced Macdove) family simulates illegal net-hunting, nest-robbing, and the raiding of estate buildings known as dovecotes, which housed pigeons and doves for food and feathers.

…

The Winter’s Tale comments on the inhumanity of the fur trade. The famous bear that pursues Antigonus off stage may have been played by an actor in a polar bear’s pelt captured by fur traders, while Queen Hermione is a personification of an ermine.

I have been wanting them to do R&GAD for TWENTY YEARS. This is brilliant.

Arian Moayed in rehearsal for Hamlet (2017)

— William Shakespeare