#shakespeare

#shakespeare

Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story.

What Maggie O'Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare's wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people ... and give them status beside this great man. ... [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.

To be a genius requires extraordinary intellect and talent, but also hard work and persistence. And although the mythology of genius can be problematic because it reduces the collective work that goes into developing scientific breakthroughs to extraordinary individual accomplishments, portrayals of genius in film and literature succeed in dazzling popular audiences.

It's all happening 400 years ago, and in London there's a riot happening, there's a mob out in the streets,

Seeing this remarkable movie reminded me that we cannot look away from real-life tragedies

Shuffling under the mortal coil this week (aka hosting the Gabfest), it's our OG players Steve, Dana, and Julia. Like a morose Danish prince contemplating a human skull, they gaze upon the Oscar nominated , based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell inspired by William Shakespeare's life. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Hamnet has brought some critics to tears and left others cold. Our hosts share where they landed.

For those of us who love the works of William Shakespeare, his reputation is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, there are abundant fellow travelers along the lifelong road of understanding his plays, and you rarely have to justify your passion for him, even to our anti-human tech overlords. And yet, it can be nearly impossible to see his plays clearly underneath the thick crust of received wisdom that covers them,

, the hit play at Studio 54, is writer and director Robert Ickes' modern - and riveting - version of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Since that play was written around 425 B.C., I'm not spilling the beans by telling you it's about the King of Thebes (Oedipus) who unknowingly fulfills his destiny by killing his father and marrying his mother. When he discovers what he has done - what he can never "unsee" - he gouges out his eyes.