Coughlan, Sean. "Tudor Coroners' Records Give Clue to 'Real Ophelia' for Shakespeare." BBC NEWS June 8, 2011.

An Oxford historian has found evidence of a story that could be the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare's tragic character, Ophelia. Dr Steven Gunn has found a coroner's report into the drowning of a Jane Shaxspere in 1569. The girl, possibly a young cousin of William Shakespeare, had been picking flowers when she fell into a millpond near Stratford upon Avon. Dr Gunn says there are "tantalising" links to Ophelia's drowning in Hamlet. A four-year research project, carried out by Oxford University academics, has been searching through 16th century coroners' reports. . . .

Coroners' reports of fatal accidents are a useful and hitherto under-studied way of exploring everyday life in Tudor England," says Dr Gunn. "Some medieval historians have used them, but the Tudor records are much fuller. The enquiries into the deaths were extensive and solemnly undertaken."

Visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13682993.

Beck, Richard. "Hamlet and the Region of Death." BOSTON GLOBE May 29, 2011.

For as long as anyone can remember, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading. Sit down with a book, pencil in hand, read, pay attention — and then tell the world what you noticed.

Franco Moretti, however, often doesn’t read the books he studies. Instead, he analyzes them as data. Working with a small group of graduate students, the Stanford University English professor has fed thousands of digitized texts into databases and then mined the accumulated information for new answers to new questions. How far, on average, do characters in 19th-century English novels walk over the course of a book? How frequently are new genres of popular fiction invented? How many words does the average novel’s protagonist speak? By posing these and other questions, Moretti has become the unofficial leader of a new, more quantitative kind of literary study.

To many readers — and to some of Moretti’s fellow academics — the very notion of quantitative literary studies can seem like an offense to that which made literature worth studying in the first place: its meaning and beauty. For Moretti, however, moving literary scholarship beyond reading is the key to producing new knowledge about old texts — even ones we’ve been studying for centuries. . . .

Visit: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/05/29/hamlet_and_the_region_of_death/?page=full.

Heinze, Eric. "Imperialism and Nationalism in Early Modernity . . . in Shakespeare's CYMBELINE." JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND LEGAL STUDIES 18.3 (2009): .

Abstract: the discourses of conquering empire and vassal nation are varied, often internally contradictory. The empire may represent openness and diversity, or militarist brutality. The underling nation may represent autonomy and self-determination, or narrow provincialism. Those discourses spawn ideologies of liberation (‘the empire liberates the nation’; ‘the nation must be liberated from the empire’) and counter-ideologies of oppression (‘the empire oppresses the nation from without’; ‘the empire prevents oppression by dominant national groups of subordinate national groups’). Such concepts are central to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Bound to pay tribute to Caesar Augustus, Britain’s King Cymbeline contemplates a national rebellion against pax romana, whilst at the same time exercising its own dominance over Wales and other conquered territory in the Isles. Parallels to the reign of James I are apparent, where England is embarking upon its ascent to empire, its pax britannica, in the face of Welsh, Scottish or Irish resistance. Several discourses emerge as hallmarks of power politics in early modernity: cosmopolitan empire, oppressive empire, cosmopolitan nation, oppressive nation. Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1398703.

Original Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled.

A portrait of William Shakespeare thought to be the only picture made of the playwright during his lifetime has been unveiled in London. It is believed the artwork dates back to 1610, six years before Shakespeare's death at the age of 52. . . .

Read the rest here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7932901.stm.

Shakespeare's First Theatre Found.

Archaeologists believe they have unearthed the remains of Shakespeare's first theatre, the BBC has learned. A team from the Museum of London discovered the foundations of what they believe is the original Globe Theatre in Shoreditch last summer. Built in 1576, it is thought the Bard acted there and that it also hosted the premiere of Romeo and Juliet. . . .

More information here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7931823.stm.

McLemee, Scott. "Prospero's Island." INSIDE HIGHER ED September 10, 2008.

We reached the island on the morning of Labor Day, as the last of the vacationers were closing up their summer rentals; they caught the afternoon ferry back to New Bedford. At peak times, there may be 300 people on Cuttyhunk. It is a tiny island with a peculiar shape, located about two hours from Boston — one hour each by land and by sea. A retired academic couple, Marvin and Betty Mandell, had lent my wife and me use of their place for a few days. (Marvin is professor emeritus of English at Curry College, while Betty holds the same position in social work at Bridgewater State College.) By the evening of our first day, the island’s population had shrunk to a few dozen people – none of whom, it turned out, was a restaurateur. We sank into the quiet. Cell phones didn’t always work, and we were wireless-less. It was a good place to let your imagination to take over. We began speculating about the puzzling sets of rocks arranged in odd patters, the occasional symbol painted here and there, the graffiti laboriously scratched into the stones of a bridge. We worked out our own myth about the sacrificial traditions of the island – two parts Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and one part H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” (It seemed obvious that worship of sinister fish gods would be involved, given all the yachts). What made the private joke work, of course, was the absolute lack of menace or stress on the island otherwise – unless you counted the occasional need to get out of the way of golf carts putting down the road. Exploring the local history books on Marvin and Betty’s shelves and in the Cuttyhunk Public Library, I became intrigued by the area’s most ambitious claim to fame. This was the theory that it served as the inspiration for Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Since getting back home, to a city with good research collections, it has been possible to explore the matter a little further. By now, it is not so much a case of scholarly fascination as reluctance to surrender all of the vacation mood. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/09/10/mclemee.

Kirsch, Adam. "Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?" NEW YORK SUN May 21, 2008.

Smith, Nigel. Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008. It would be hard to dispute that Shakespeare's plays are more powerful, and more central to our culture, than Milton's biblical epics or his artfully classical lyrics. Around the world, when people dream about true love, they think of Romeo and Juliet; when they thrill with ambition, they think of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and so on down the list of Shakespeare's characters. Harold Bloom could even speculate, not quite in jest, that Shakespeare invented human nature, so completely does he seem to dominate our imagination of what it means to be human. Ever since Paradise Lost was published in 1667, Milton has been acclaimed as a supreme English poet, Shakespeare's only rival in linguistic mastery. Yet even at the height of his prestige, in the 18th century, Milton never inspired the kind of ardent intimacy that readers bring to Shakesepare. Nor is it simply our lazy generation, unused to reading long poems and deaf to the majesty of Milton's artifice, that has relegated Paradise Lost to the seminar room. Even Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of Milton," wrote that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/arts/doing-battle-with-the-bard/76756/.

Nussbaum, Martha. "Stages of Thought." NEW REPUBLIC May 7, 2008.

Philosophers often try to write about Shakespeare. Most of the time they are ill-equipped to do so. There is something irresistibly tempting in the depth and the complexity of the plays, and it lures people who respond to that complexity with abstract thought, even if for the most part they are utterly unprepared, emotionally or stylistically, to write about literary experience. Such philosophers see profound thought in Shakespeare, not wrongly. But armed with their standard analytic equipment, they frequently produce accounts that are laughably reductive, contributing little or nothing to philosophy or to the understanding of Shakespeare. To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=e1bd6ffa-c648-4d40-8efd-.40dd1b31b444

Porter, Peter. "How Shakespeare Started Out." TIMES March 5, 2008.

One of the fascinations of literary scholarship is its hold on writers of our own time. Contemporary poets read Shakespeare almost as if he were a rival, or some sort of perennial vade mecum of technical forms and approaches. John Berryman, embodying that special concept of his time, the “anxiety of influence”, went so far as to lament having written so much verse when he might have spent his life editing King Lear. Even without the expanding needs of modern education, Shakespeare would be with us in hundreds of studies year by year. What remains to be said that is new? Must all evaluation be reassessment in historical and lexicographical terms, or forays into literary value-judging, a procedure with hundreds of books behind it, from ancient Bradley to latest Kermode? The present fascination with Shakespeare’s life and some of its more speculative corners (E. A. J. Honigman’s Lost Years, James Shapiro’s 1599 and Charles Nicholls’s The Lodger) turns out to be as packed with basic literary criticism as any of their more orthodox predecessors. However equivocal Shakespeare’s record may be, his is one of the most familiar presences in our lives. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3489393.ece?print=yes.

Boyle, Joe. "The Real Sound of Shakespeare." BBC NEWS UK MAGAZINE

Ever been baffled by the bard? Vexed by his verse? Or perplexed by his puns? London's Globe theatre thinks it has the answer: perform Shakespeare's plays in Shakespeare's dialect. In August the theatre will stage an "original production" of Troilus and Cressida, with the actors performing the lines as closely as possibly to the play's first performance - in 1604. By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire - yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina. . . . Read the rest here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4694993.stm.