Shakespeare Sunday
Shakespeare Sunday began as a weekly response to a community prompt. Each post pairs a quotation, image, and personal reflection, to explore Shakespeare as a living writer rather than a monument. Some are playful. Some are argumentative. All are invitations to read more closely. And to join the conversation …
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She’s White: Skin in Antony and Cleopatra
Readers sometimes forget that the modern obsession with tanning is relatively recent.
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Red Right Hand: Hands in Macbeth
Macbeth? The play of blood. And black. And birds, too. But today, let’s talk about hands.
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Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Education in As You Like It
A confession: every time I watch the play – and no matter who is playing the part – I fall in love with Rosalind all over again.
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Sharp Dressed Man: Costume in King Lear
I’ve learned to embrace my own scruffiness, but at the same time I HATE the idea that my students live in a world where, increasingly, appearance equals personality or worth. When you put the right clothes on the wrong person … ?
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The Boys of Summer: Holidays in Much Ado About Nothing
As a student, are you / were you ever bored during the summer holidays? If you’re planning a holiday, how long would be ‘too long’? What, then, IS a holiday?
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Things Have Changed: the Moon in Romeo and Juliet
Even Plutarch gives us versions of the moon yearning after the sun. Although elsewhere they’re figured as siblings. God – those Ancient Greeks!
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Comfortably Numb: Medicine in Richard II
“Hello? Is there anybody in there?” Richard II is too comfortably numb to listen to deathbed advice from his dissenting uncle.
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‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Rome in Julius Caesar
To Shakespeare’s audience, Rome was more than an idea – it was often an ideal. But what is this ‘Rome’? Who gets to define it? Or what it wants/needs?
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‘Busload of Faith’: Hope and Disappointment in Hamlet
Shakespeare almost inevitably influences the authors who come after him, but a four-hundred-year-old play can also change when we revisit it wearing Cold War glasses.
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‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Belonging in Richard II
Where do we belong? Where is home? Mowbray helps us get to the heart of this.