Shakespeare

Yesterday

The Spectator

Letters: The futility of net zero

Not zero Sir: I was delighted to see your leading article about the impossibility of net zero (‘Carbon candour’, 22 March). We need now to expose its futility. The UK’s efforts will make no difference at all to global temperature. Whether it is naturally occurring or produced through coal burning, there is not the slightest chance of stopping the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (not ‘carbon’, which is nasty black stuff). Guy Liardet Meonstoke, Hampshire Ideological bullets Sir: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’, they say. But by biting the hand of business with her Budget, Rachel Reeves has shown total recklessness (‘The Rachel capers’, 22 March). By killing

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Something is rotten in Stratford-upon-Avon

Almost every nation has a national poet. The Russians have Pushkin. The Persians have Ferdowsi. The Albanians have Gjergj Fishta. But it would be a very odd thing if any of these peoples had their national poet taken away from them or were forced to have their national poet insulted. Indeed, it might be considered rather bad form if someone told the Russians that the author of Eugene Onegin should be held accountable for the era of serfdom. Or told the Persians that the author of the ‘Shahnameh’ should be as nought because his era did not have all our views on gay marriage. Yet the English. Ah – the

Thursday

Sam Leith

The anti-genius of William McGonagall, history’s worst poet

‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet, as the Stratford man knew, is to be immortal. But there’s another way to achieve immortality through verse – and that is the route taken by William McGonagall, the ‘worst poet in history’, who was born 200 years ago this month. His star, I’m pleased to say, shows no sign of fading. He has, as is only proper, an adjective. You can be Keatsian, Eliotian, Homeric. Or, like most of us when we sit down to write a poem, you can be McGonagallesque. His name is so much a byword

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Shakespeare as cruise-ship entertainment: Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing reviewed

Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II is a high-calibre version of a fascinating story. A king reluctantly yields his crown to a usurper who wants his violent revolt to seem like a peaceful transfer of authority. This delicate, complex narrative is presented as a boardroom power struggle in corporate Britain. Snappy suits for the dukes and princes. Commando uniforms when they take to the battlefield. Jonathan Bailey (Richard) starts as a swaggering, coke-snorting yuppie who dreams of extending his realm overseas with someone’s else money. Disaster strikes, the crown slips. Calamity sharpens his awareness and he becomes a lyrical philosopher who laments the bewitchments and pitfalls of power. Bailey’s charming, easy-going Richard

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Cheerless and fussy: The Tempest, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell, his final masterpiece or, if you’re being cynical, the play that made him jack it all in. Some actors admit that it can be hard to stage and dull to perform. What is it exactly? A children’s fairy tale and a soppy romance with snatches of drunken farce and political intrigue. Quite a muddle. The setting is famously eccentric. Shakespeare whisks the audience away from reality and drops them in a magical kingdom where a sanctimonious wizard rules over a population of goblins and fairies. The overbearing soundtrack keeps coming up with new ways to irritate your eardrums Some directors try to correct the Bard

Thursday

Emma Smith

Thomas Kyd wasn’t a patch on Shakespeare

The biggest blockbuster hit of the Elizabethan theatre was not by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson. In fact it wasn’t by anyone. The Spanish Tragedy, a sturdy play of rhetoric, blood and revenge, was published in multiple editions without any attribution at all. Its central figure, Hieronimo, was a cultural phenomenon, but the drama was widely quoted, imitated and parodied without mention of its author. Its impact was huge. We wouldn’t have Hamlet without it. BBC Radio 4’s invitation to celebrities to try experiences they have unaccountably missed is called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. Without a doubt, the Elizabethan equivalent would have been I’ve Never Seen

Craig Raine

4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough

This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein: I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician]. Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.  Towards the end of his life, in

Tuesday

Will Tosh

Fortitude, emotional intelligence and wit – the defining qualities of Simon Russell Beale

The path to National Treasureland is no paved highway. Simon Russell Beale, the finest classical actor of his generation, was nearly lost to academia (he swerved a PhD in Victorian literature), and faced down pigeon-holing from an agent who wanted to change his name to Simon Beagle, the better to capitalise on a knack for dopily jolly comedy roles. Now – and not before time – he’s written an elegant study of Shakespeare that does double duty as a juicy actor’s autobiography. The pleasure here is in the mix of green room gossip and literary insight. There’s plenty of the former: dining next to Lauren Bacall at the chat show

Friday

Katy Balls

The Tracy-Ann Oberman Edition

31 min listen

Actress and writer Tracy-Ann Oberman is well known for her roles across theatre, radio and television, including Dr Who, Friday Night Dinner, It’s a Sin and, of course, EastEnders. Most recently, she has taken on one of the most famous, and problematic, Shakespearean roles: as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Inspired by her great-grandmother, she has reimagined the role as a Jewish matriarch, and the play returns to London’s West End this December. On the podcast, Katy Balls talks to Tracy about her obsession with the Roman Empire, what it was like spending a term in Moscow towards the end of perestroika, and her  career from soap to Shakespeare, hero to villain. As she has

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Faultless visuals – shame about the play: the National’s Coriolanus reviewed

Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome. Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech. The Roman soldiers have plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching’ The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s

Tuesday

Francesca Peacock

Life’s little graces: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed

Garth Greenwell has made a name for himself as a chronicler of touch. In his previous novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), the intimacy of a lover’s hand or the frisson of something much darker – the spit, the slap of a BDSM session – could expand to fill whole paragraphs: stories in themselves of layered sensation and reminiscence. Early in the opening sequence of Small Rain, the unnamed narrator spends close to two pages musing on the ‘shock’ of when a nurse ‘softly stroked or rubbed my ankle’. But now the touch is different. This is not a novel of sexual escapades, but pain – like

Tuesday

Orlando Bird

Love it or loathe it – the umami flavour of anchovy

We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies. How times change. Today the average Spaniard puts away 2.69 kilos of the things each year, but it was a different story in the 16th century, when the Catalan chef Ruperto de Nola complained that anchovies were ‘commonly bitter’. A little later, the English physician Tobias Venner fumed that they ‘do nourish nothing at all, but a naughty cholerick blood’.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Shapeless and facile: The Hot Wing King, at the Dorfman Theatre, reviewed

Our subsidised theatres often import shows from the US without asking whether our theatrical tastes align with America’s. The latest arrival, The Hot Wing King, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about unhealthy eating. The production opens in a luxury house in Memphis, occupied, rather strangely, by four gay men who dress gracelessly in cheap, flashy designer gear. They behave like overgrown babies and spend their time leaping about the place, bickering and bantering, singing songs, performing dance moves and exchanging cuddles. This cameo repeats the caricature of the foolish African crook. Why is the Globe perpetuating racial bigotry? One of the four man-babies wears a business suit and calls himself

Tuesday

Christopher Akers

The roots of anti-Semitism in Europe

The medieval trope that Jews are inherently bloodthirsty has echoed down the ages. Forms of the blood libel have been disseminated ever since the myth emerged in England in the 12th century with claims that Christian children were being ritually murdered by Jews in re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus. In the aftermath of 7 October, Labour’s Rochdale by-election candidate Azhar Ali accused Israel of lowering its defences so that it could justify the shedding of innocent Palestinian blood. Gigi Hadid, the American model, shared a video which alleged that Israel is harvesting the organs of Palestinians. The International Criminal Court’s pursuit of arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Eddie Izzard’s one-man Hamlet deserves top marks

Every Hamlet is a failure. It always feels that way because playgoers tend to compare what they’re seeing with a superior version that exists only in their heads. And since disappointment is inevitable, it’s worth celebrating the successful novelties in Eddie Izzard’s solo version. He makes some valuable breakthroughs, especially in the comedic sections. Izzard makes some valuable breakthroughs. His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s rare His Gravedigger is funny. Actually funny. That’s pretty rare. He plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sock-puppets whose robotic yapping he imitates with his hands. Brilliant stuff. Well worth copying. His Osric is a greasy, cocktail-party flatterer with a faint Mexican accent. Osric, the

Maureen Lipman

Who is allowed to play Richard III?

On Tuesday night I was body double/understudy for the brave, brainy, beautiful Rachel Riley, at a packed ‘support Israel’ evening. The keynote speaker was the brave, brainy, beautiful lawyer Natasha Hausdorff. I was slightly out of my depth but I hope I provided some light relief. Natasha was dazzling in defence of beleaguered democracy, but the facts are sombre and the audience went home a little more concerned about our future in the diaspora. Anti-Semitism is known to be a light sleeper. I fear it may become insomniac. I’ve been arguing vehemently with my brother Geoff about everything and nothing for 75 years. Inevitably, these days, our arguments are about

Thursday

Elizabeth Goldring

The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown

Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace on 24 March 1603 at the age of 69 after a reign of 45 years. Her health had been poor from the early 1590s onwards: arthritis, gastric disorders, chronic insomnia and migraines were just some of the ailments which plagued her. Yet, uniquely among English monarchs, she refused to make provision for the succession. James I made great efforts to ensure that his escape from the Gunpowder Plot would not soon be forgotten From Tudor to Stuart is Susan Doran’s enthralling account of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres of those who had a viable claim to succeed the Virgin Queen. The group included the Habsburg Isabella

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Amazingly sloppy: Romeo & Juliet, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed

Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare with power cuts. The lighting in Jamie Lloyd’s cheerless production keeps shutting down, perhaps deliberately. The show stars Tom Holland (also known as Spider-Man) whose home in Verona resembles a sound studio that’s just been burgled. There’s nothing in it apart from a few microphones on metal stands. He and his mates, all dressed in hoodies and black jeans, deliver their lines without feeling or energy as if recording the text for an audiobook. Some of them appear to misunderstand the verse. Shakespeare’s most thrilling romance has been turned into a sexless bore When not muttering their lines they stare accusingly into the middle distance,

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Player Kings proves that Shakespeare can be funny

Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic with every actor screaming, bawling, weeping, howling and generally overdoing it. But here’s a surprise. Player Kings, Icke’s new version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is a dazzling piece of entertainment and the only exaggerated performance comes from Sir Ian McKellen who plays Falstaff, quite rightly, as a noisy, swaggering dissembler. Those who imagine ‘Shakespearean comedy’ to be an oxymoron will be pleasantly surprised Small details deliver large dividends. The tavern scenes are set in an east London hipster bar with chipped wooden tables and exposed brickwork. Richard

Charles Moore Charles Moore

My letter from Chris Packham

I do not know Chris Packham, the BBC nature broadcaster, personally, but he wrote me a letter last month, enclosing a book called Manifesto, The Battle for Green Britain by Dale Vince which, he tells me, ‘has something very important to say at this most important time’. In his letter, Chris says that ‘irrespective of any party politics’, ‘The coming election will be the most important of our lifetimes’ because we are ‘halfway through the last decade’ left to avoid ‘the worst of climate breakdown’. So ‘we must help young voters navigate the new voting rules’. Politics has ‘become the final frontier for a real greener Britain’. What Chris does