So, yes, fabulous stuff!

Also, the ground plan is v evocative. This is my favourite detail. Shk spent his life in Stratford around dunghills, and here one is literally outside his front door in London.

academic.oup.com/sq/article-a...

Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph Cambridge Core - Renaissance and Early Modern Literature - Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph

Plus… Susanna in London. @kscheil.bsky.social shows that someone, likely Susanna, commissioned Anne’s memorial brass from a high-end London engraver. Perhaps she too stayed in the Blackfriars while doing things like that.

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

First, as article says, v interesting implications for Shakespeare’s (the Shakespeares’?) engagement with London in 1613. It’s big enough to be 2 houses.

Do read @lucycmunro.bsky.social’s wonderful article and thread. Also fwiw some quick superficial comments -

This is marvellous!

A man of property Just outside the City of London, in the secluded streets once occupied by the monastic precinct of the Black Friars, is an unassuming warehouse building

Found a Shakespeare thing; wrote about it in @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat....

I don’t know whether to be more impressed by his cruelty or his marksmanship.

Got my first real badger
Bought it from the five and dime
Ended up with significant injuries
It was the summer of 2009….

Also – hats off to Scheil – it is so damn *clever*. The brass has been known to every Shakespeare scholar for centuries, and is seen by thousands of visitors every month. Scheil just looks at it differently, and the results are amazing. (3/3)

It opens up vistas on the Shakespeares’ marriage, their relationship with London, and their tomb complex in Stratford. Really interesting for #Hamnet, obviously. (2/3)

I read this in draft, and it’s wonderful. (1/3)

Happy birthday to you, Tracey!

A quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics C...

Then light dawned - they are basically Douglas Adams’s Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

www.goodreads.com/quotes/98555...

www.goodreads.com/quotes/98555...

Like others my mind kept turning not just to the uses, but to the companies that are creating these far-from-neutral black box thingies. So cheery, so profit-driven, so sinister.

Congratulations to the presenters, to @lisahopkins.bsky.social and Deborah Cartmell, and to @bsashakespeare.bsky.social on the “AI and Shakespeare” conference. Much to chew on. (1/3)

A shelf of books including Lee Jackson’s Dirty Old London

Hello @victorianlondon.bsky.social - look what I bumped into on the reference shelves of the National Archives!

Speeding up Shakespeare; studies of the bygone theatre and drama : Lawrence, William John, 1862-1940 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive 220 p. 20 cm

On the former - yes, certainly some evidence for stage dummies - a very old essay in here: archive.org/details/spee...

Henry Wotton, “On the sudden restraint of the Earl of Somerset”:
Dazzled thus with height of place,
Whilst our hopes our wits beguile,
No man marks the narrow space
'Twixt a prison and a smile.

In Our Time - Henry IV Part 1 - BBC Sounds Shakespeare's powerful exploration of power and succession with Hotspur, Hal and Falstaff.

Really enjoyed this, in which @oldfortunatus.bsky.social, @lucycmunro.bsky.social, and my esteemed colleague Laurence Publicover, all wearing lightly their massive learning, talk about how much fun the Henry IV plays are.
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Mayne’s The City Match, satirizing puritans: “Yesterday I went / To see a lady that has a parrot. My woman / While I was in discourse converted the fowl, / And now it can speak nought but Knox’s works. / So there’s a parrot lost.”
Not specified that it comes on - but you couldn't not, could you?

Next week: “At half-time, the home crowd were delighted when the second XI performed some scenes from that perennial favourite The Island Princess”.

How ‘Hamnet’ sidelines Anne Hathaway Historical records suggest that Shakespeare’s wife was central to his career and life. So why does this film reduce her to a woman of the woods?

Prospect magazine have suspended their paywall for this weekend - so if you want to read their review of Hamnet, or indeed anything else, it’s free till Feb 2.

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/the-...

Front page of today’s Sunday Times, with a panel for an article inside, “how accurate is Hamnet?”

Very pleased that the Mrs Shakspaire letter is mentioned in the Sunday Times today!

Yes, absolutely! It would have made Imtiaz Habib very happy to see it.

Old St Paul's, the cathedral which was destroyed in the Great Fire of London.

And there's some great detail. Was that the Moorish Ambassador watching Hamlet in 1600? Not categorically impossible. And the night scene by the Thames, where as the camera moves Old St Paul's looms up where you would expect. For someone immersed in the stuff, the effect is uncanny. (3/3)

From a Shakespearean's POV - much more Hamlet than was in the novel, and that worked thrillingly well. Inevitably scope to argue about historical fidelity, but Shakespeare, glass houses, stones. (2/3)

I loved Hamnet, which was beautiful throughout, and very joyful (by the standards of films about the plague). (1/3)

Have emailed you!

That piece by you and Heather likewise! I had no idea Adams was a card-carrying white supremacist, which as you say gives a pretty chilling twist to the whole affair.