Romans, Egyptians, and Crocodiles

For many, including the friend who invited me to join her at the theater, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream should be staged in an Arthur Rackham world, replete with nineteenth-century fairies clothed in gossamer robes. Although my friend was deeply disappointed that Peter Brook’s famous 1970 production did not conform to her…

Shakespeare Quarterly has some exciting news to share. On January 1, 2019, Oxford University Press (OUP) will become the journal’s new publisher.

Both Ewan Fernie and Paul Kottman have recently published books that address the expansive topics of Shakespeare and freedom. In addition to each author reviewing the other’s book in our Fall 2017 issue, Fernie and Kottman answered a set of our questions to further explore the relationship between Shakespeare and freedom.

When his career appeared to have bottomed out in 2009, comedian Marc Maron turned in desperation to the medium of podcasting and created WTF with Marc Maron, a show that has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon with over six million downloads per month…

Dr. Barbara Mowat, our friend and colleague, coeditor of the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, consulting editor at Shakespeare Quarterly, former director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, former editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and former chair of the Folger Institute, passed away on November 24, 2017. She was 83….

One springboard for my recent book, The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare (which Ken Gross generously reviews in Shakespeare Quarterly 68.1), was what Randall McLeod has called a “Keatspearian” moment. On January 23^rd, 1818, John Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey that he “sat down to read King Lear . . . and felt the greatness of the thing up to the writing of a Sonnet preparatory thereto.”…

I was at a matinee performance of Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in May of 2016, looking down at the action from way up in the balcony, surrounded by Canadian High School students. Two young women in front of me spent the afternoon making out. But I’d heard the story was good, and I wanted to see how things would turn out…

Well, now. It looks like Caesar can really matter to this play!

That might seem a not-so-striking discovery. After all, countless European students over many centuries learned to venerate Caesar as a leader of exceptional genius who brought law, order, and civilization to the rugged…

Missouri Williams’s King Lear with Sheep lives up to its title: it stages Shakespeare’s famous play with sheep. More specifically: Shetland, Blackface, and Oxford Down sheep from both urban and agricultural farms in England, who have played Lear in a wide variety of heaths. The play premiered in a former timber warehouse at Surrey Docks…

It is with great pleasure that we at Shakespeare Quarterly launch this new digital space. It will highlight and showcase the content of current and upcoming published issues of the journal. It will also host supplemental materials that will give you a more robust engagement with the essays in our issues. Additionally, lively…

I write here to bid two farewells—the first on behalf of all of us at Shakespeare Quarterly to our brilliant colleague Barbara A. Mowat who died on 24 November 2017; the second from me to the readers of SQ whom I have been delighted to serve (with a hiatus during the tenure of David Schalkwyk) since taking over as Editor in 1997…

The exchange between Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius on the nature of the Nile crocodile is one of the most striking passages of Antony and Cleopatra: on Antony’s account, this curious reptile is like unto itself alone. In this essay, I look afresh at the sources and analogs on which Shakespeare may have drawn in scripting Antony’s crocodile, and use them as a tool with which to reconsider the apparent collision between the Roman and Egyptian worldviews that shapes so much of the play…

Modern biographical studies of Shakespeare owe much to John Aubrey’s decision in 1681 to interview the retired theater manager William Beeston. Preserved in the notes that arose from their discussions is an anecdote that has proven especially tantalizing to scholars: on the verso side of MS Aubrey 8, fol. 45—a paper slip bound into one of the folios at the Bodleian Library containing Aubrey’s Brief Lives—are the words: “the more to be admired quia he was not a company keeper / lived in Shoreditch, would n[o]t be debauched, & if invited to / [gout?]: he was in paine”…

This essay explores the way Angelo and Isabella appeal to rules in their attempts to justify the legality or ethics of their actions, and thus relieve themselves of the burden of responsibility. (“It is the law, not I, condemn your brother.”) However, the play will confront them with the truth that all rules, even the most precise, require a human agent to use them in a particular context. (“O, it is excellent / To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant.”)…