First a brief suggestion of the complexity of the city; I do not say ‘London’ because, as the preceding section made clear, London, thanks to the translatio imperii, as well as its position at the centre of Britain’s overseas trade, was something of an every-city. Between 1576 and 1642 London grew at a considerably faster …
Did you know that the word “jointress”, used by Claudius to describe his new wife and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is an Elizabethan legal term for a widow who owns property from her first marriage? I didn’t, until a contributor to Open Shakespeare made use of the site’s annotator tool to leave a comment on Hamlet …
Exam season is finishing, our free time is returning, and Open Shakespeare is coming back to life. We held a short meeting yesterday evening, and can now announce what we intend to do in the near future: EXPAND: there will be an Open Shakespeare Party in Emmanuel Fellows’ Garden, Cambridge at 3pm on 14th June. …
A play of politics and prophecy, masques and magic, gods and ghosts, nightmares and nationalism, Cymbeline (c. 1609-11) resists categorization. Like The Winter’s Tale it traces a fine line between comedy and tragedy; like Antony and Cleopatra it vacillates between the epic scale of the histories and the intimate focus of the romances. But perhaps …
Perhaps there will one day be a site called ‘Open Tolkein’. Until then, allow me to draw your attention to the occurences of the name of one of the Old Inkling’s most famous characters in the works of the Bard. Although there are many fairies and spirits in Shakespeare’s works, and the occasionaly talking animal, …
There are nine occurances of this word in Shakespeare, which first entered the English language with Skelton’s satirical Speke Parrot around 1525. The nine instances focus on a variety of the bird’s aspects, and not just the most obvious. Testament, one supposes, to Shakespeare’s powers of perception, or, given his resemblance to a pirate in …
…as found in the quintessentially Shakespearean ‘What a piece of work is man!’ speech from Hamlet. ‘Quintessence of dust’ marks the speech’s turning point: the former word is the last gasp of Hamlet’s ironic praise for mankind, the latter is the first explicit admittance of his estrangement from others: What a piece of work is …
Click on the links below to read the most recently uploaded short introductions – and, of course, the plays that go with them: The Winter’s Tale Titus Andronicus King John A Midsummer Night’s Dream Love’s Labour’s Lost As You Like It
The first few weeks of 2010 have seen the Open Shakespeare team writing more short introductions – roughly two-thirds of the canon now has an introduction on the site or ready to upload. We are also sorting out the last few issues with our annotation software, and preparing a longer introduction to Shakespeare’s life and …
The last six months have seen significant developments on our Open Shakespeare project, many of which have are reflected on the website: http://www.openshakespeare.org/ The most major advance is the availability of new HTML and PDF editions of the texts, see, for example, these versions of Twelfth Night: http://www.openshakespeare.org/resource/view/92/twelfth-night-moby/ http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/twelfth_night_moby.pdf We’ve also made improvements to multiview, …
Rufus Pollock
Iain Emsley
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