This time you get six links. Two festivals, two Shakespeares with gender-play, and two interesting Shakespeare resources.
- Every so often we share five links to interesting things we’ve found or looked at recently. These cover Shakespeare, gender, theatre, arts, or anything else that we stumble across. Click here to browse the archives, or click on the labels below to search by topic.
Tweet us any suggestions with the hashtag #sfg5.
Catford-Upon-Avon
A great Shakespeare festival being run in the beautiful Catford Broadway theatre, by none other than Action To The Word, one of our favourite theatre companies.
Only a few days left to catch this, but very much worth supporting, so do spread the word!
Women In The West End
(pictured)
Another festival, being run Upstairs at the Arts, a lovely Off-West-End theatre in the heart of London. Headline is F.A.N.Y., which we’ve spoken about before, and each lunchtime they’re performing a new Crawshaw play, Nonsense & Sensibility – a Jurassic-Park-inspired-Jane-Austen-spoof (that classic genre).
Alongside the shows, though, they’re running all sorts of gender focussed events and guest showings, including ‘Friendsday Wednesday’ guest slots, plus a series of Q&As, Lectures and other events. 50/50 looks particularly interesting, but check out their site for all the info.
Mapping Shakespeare’s Tragedies
This is interesting. A data analyst has mapped the connections between characters in the tragedies, based on who shares scenes.
Here are a couple of examples:
 Titus Andronicus |
 Othello (in more detail) |
Check out the site for more, including larger versions of the images. There’s also a free downloadable poster size one, if you’re into that sort of thing.
How this might impact our practical approaches to Shakespeare, I’m not yet certain. But they sure are pretty.
An all-female Macbeth
One for our American cousins. Macbeth performed by an all-female cast in a Cathedral in Portland. Sounds great fun, from the reviews. If your’re nearby, please go and support them!
Folger Digital Texts
A great resource here. Folger have recently produced free, downloadable versions of their Shakespeare series. They’re available in five formats. PDFs, HTML, and plain text are available, as well as XML – which may open the way for people to do some interesting data-driven stuff with them.
But most useful will be the Word versions, for smaller theatre companies wanting to edit their own scripts.
The reason this is a big deal is that these text have been curated, so they’re gonna be of a much higher quality than the free versions currently available online (if you’ve ever put on a Shakespeare play on any kind of budget, you’ll know the ones I mean). Fewer typos and or unhelpful punctuation choices to fix.
The Reversed Shakespeare Company: Midsummer Night’s Dream
You may remember these guys from our Work Bard Play Bard nights. Their gender-swapped Midsummer is running at Pleasance now. On Thursday 24th, there’s a panel talk with some very interesting speakers (and also us).
