is performing it for yourself gaining the highest reward?

Edit: just to preface, it wasn't a student performance as in "students acting in the play". They were professional actors, but everyone in the audience were either students or teachers who brought the students.

Yesterday I went to a student performance of King Lear,, with discounted tickets and a Q&A after for those who were interested. It was my first Shakespeare play and my first exposure to the play itself as I need to study it for English A Level soon.

However, the audience was honestly quite disrespectful, and it made me wonder how many of them were there because they wanted to be, or whether they've even been to a theatre or cinema at all before.

The most off-putting thing was how people would straight up laugh at parts that were obviously not funny. I could name exactly three quips in general play that were meant to be funny, even darkly funny, but there is nothing funny about Lear having a mental breakdown or lying down next to his dead daughter and mourning!!

It wasn't even nervous laughter either, it was actual chuckling from a collective group. It was honestly really disrespectful not only by disrupting other audience members but also to the actors!!! Like what the hell?!

There was also this one guy who was sat front row at stage level, and he kept stretching his legs out into the stage. Like oh my god stop that.

Anyways this is a bit of a rant so I'll try and end positive; the performances were fantastic, the staging was great, and I thoroughly enjoyed. But goddamn some people were rude.

​

Cowardly manipulation and cannon fodder

i've heard of people doing such, and perhaps you have too, and i was wondering what was gained from it?

The relation between Norns, Weird Sisters, and Witches.

Here's some interesting news.

Dramatic new evidence concludes that the play Edward III should be added to William Shakespeare’s canon, and also that it was a major collaboration with his contemporary rival Christopher Marlowe.

The history was published anonymously in 1596, and it has long been thought that Shakespeare wrote at least a few scenes. However, Dr Rory Loughnane, a leading scholar and co-author of the research, told the Guardian that computerised textual analysis pushed the case “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Stratford-born playwright was the principal writer.

He said: “That’s the new finding, that both Shakespeare, now confirmed beyond doubt, and Marlowe, unexpectedly found for the first time, are present in the play, and therefore it represents a newly found collaboration between the two.

The article doesn't go into too much detail about what 'computerised textual analysis' means, whether it's AI analysis or not, but the paper isn't out yet.

What's your best guess or belief about what Shakespeare was doing in the "lost years" (1585 - 1592)? Any evidence?

I don't understand why it isn't avaliable on streaming or hasn't ever been released on DVD? Is there some sort of residuals issue? I have to imagine Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't care that much about making money off of this, but I was recently reminded of its existence and I just want to be able to watch it again, but the only way I can seem to find it is illegally burned DVD's on sketchy third party websites, there isn't even an illegal copy online anywhere.

The sort of idea that you think of after reading a play too many times, but honestly would never work on stage. Go big or go home guys! The stranger, the better

It’s been about a month since I started re-reading, and re-sounding, Shakespeare’s sonnets, for myself and for my kids.
So far that’s 38 musical versions of 18 sonnets (1, 2, 5, 18, 27, 43, 60, 66, 77, 94, 98, 113, 116, 124, 128, 129, 141, 146) tango and vals, trap, salsa and salsa choke, bachata, milonga, chacarera, phonk, club, and a few others.
The one my kids like for most is Sonnet 113 in the club version. They say it has “aura”, and the melody and the hook are a bit catchy. It’s also the first sonnet I've made a song with, the one where I changed the lyrics most, to make it easier for me to follow: the list near the end (“the mountain or the sea, the day or night, the crow or dove… it shapes them to your feature”) became a repeated hook, and the chorus keeps the opening and the closing couplet. I know this isn’t how the poem is built, and I may have lost things I couldn’t hear.
The music is AI-assisted. None of it is on Spotify or any other streaming platform. For now it’s only on Suno, YouTube and a small UK indie radio station, abyssfm.
I'm happy if your kids also like it.

I’ve been rereading Measure for Measure, and Lucio keeps stealing my attention. He’s a gossip and a nuisance, but he also drives the plot forward at a key moment, and he pays for it in the end. It made me wonder how many minor characters do real structural work that gets overlooked. Who’s your pick, and in which play?

Manhood, vengeance, societal expectations, the cycle of violence, nature, slutty women— all prevalent themes in Hamlet. Curiously…all subjects and content that lingers around the Manosphere.

In a recent showcase, where I performed the “Get Thee To a Nunnery,” scene, I was struck by how much Hamlet sounded like the men in the modern day manosphere. 

"I have heard of your paintings"

“God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another” 

“You jig and amble.”

“Make your wantoness your ignorance”

The dots weren’t difficult to connect. Then you look at the manosphere adjacent media, Taxi Driver, Fight Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, and all I could think was— hey, is Prince Hamlet an incel?

I mean think about it, the guy is constantly emo, lamenting about how fake people and society are, how his rightful place in line for the crown was taken, how women are sluts no matter what they do. 

So I thought…hey, what if someone took Hamlet, and put it in the context of the manosphere?

What if Claudius is Andrew Tate?

What if Gertrude is a TradWife?

What if Hamlet is a whiney little boy in line to inherit his father’s content house, The Den? 

Well, I adapted Hamlet to find out! G.O.A.T. A Hamlet Adaptation goes up THIS WEEK at Green Lung Studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn!

Featuring an entirely women cast, G.O.A.T highlights the absurd reality of these spaces, and how they directly affect how young women perceive themselves and are limited in their ability to safely move through the world - it’s maddening.

If you’re an NYC artist looking to meet other upcoming artists obsessed with the classics, trust this is for you. 

BTW— the Saturday shows are followed by an awesome Halloween party. ‘Cause what can you do after Hamlet but drink?

[Grab your tickets here](applenotes:note/eb3eed3d-915c-471b-8627-81dc848a2c27?ownerIdentifier=_abe38691d2b6e720f5152598d0c8a6bc)!

Oct. 22 @ 7:30

Oct. 23 @ 7:30

Oct. 24 @ 2:00 & 7:30

Oct. 31 @ 2:00 & 7:30

Would love to hear more thoughts and opinions on incel Hamlet. What other Shakespeare plays are embedded with echoes of what has become the manosphere?

Hi, prithee let me know what you think. Start answer with "Methinks..." :)

I’ll go first. I was recently in a production of Romeo and Juliet, I played Benvolio. When reading Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio was always my favorite, and while our Mercutio was amazing, I started to latch onto Tybalt more just because of what the actor did with him. I thought that was interesting and wondered if you guys had any similar experiences.

I don't know how common this is as I'm pretty new to shakespeare, but I thought I'd share :)

bookseller said it's from around 1900, but upon researching I found out that it's probably actually from 1860 or so.

let me know if there's anything else in here you'd like to see! I just took a couple of random images from inside.

also, let me know which one I should read first :)

Hi all,

Cutting a long story short, I have to write a blog post for a midterm university assignment and am doing mine on Bottom. I am looking for some photos of the character to include throughout my blog, and was wondering if anyone has any favourite photos of Bottom from any productions or film?

If you can let me know who is playing him in your photo or where it is from, that would be much appreciated! 😊

Thank you in advance.

With Edward the 3rd, that brings the total up to 39:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/18/scholars-conclude-beyond-doubt-that-shakespeare-was-main-author-of-edward-iii

Do we have any information about how he planned his plays- surviving plans, scribbles etc.? I'm just re-reading Lear for the millionth time, and I can't shake off the notion, with this particular play, that Shakespeare did the Elizabethan version of "mood-boarding" before he started writing- that he mind-mapped sea-monsters, blasting fogs, stormy nights, elemental natural imagery, "vision" motifs. It's a work which just has an unmistakable atmosphere (I mean, many of the plays do, and they're all very well-constructed, too, but I'm just curious about how he sketched the vibe for Lear, which is one of my favourites). Probably wishful thinking but I'd love to see such surviving planning documents if they're still around.

Sonnet number 29 is the answer

Hope you like my playing with Shakespeare. Considering making more of this style of video