The ‘teenager’ would seem to be a recent invention. Thanks to social and economic factors in the West (i.e. we’ve got more money and more time), our transition from boys to men/girls to women is no longer simply a matter of a half-day bar/batmitzvah event; rather it takes place over several years in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood. Representations of this gradual transition—teenagerhood—in television shows like…

Shakespeare is a man for all ages. If you tried Ben Jonson’s rave review on your average school student they probably wouldn’t agree; instead, the very name William Shakespeare could be enough to make them look confused, yawn with boredom, or tremble with fear. If you sat them down in front of a play, however, they just might believe it. In January 2010 I joined the eight to twelve-year-olds of Claremont School, Kingsbury…

For our celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday today, we thought we would complement our own blogging about Shakespeare’s influence on us with some quotes from writers on how Shakespeare has influenced them. Read below for quotes from William Carlos Williams, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, Roger Ebert, and Harold Bloom.

When I was very young—in first or second grade perhaps—my aunt gave my parents a book called, if I remember correctly, The Bathroom Book. It was an anthology of short selections from literature, each of which was meant to be the right length to read while on the john. I thought this was hilarious and took to paging through the book and reading the pieces aloud.
I was quickly drawn to one selection in particular, a few lines from “the famous play of Romeo and Juliet.”
Romeo
She speaks: 

O, speak …

Shakespeare is almost directly responsible for the huge change in direction my life took about six years ago. I was a software developer, but I wasn’t satisfied doing it, and I’d turned to acting in community theatre to give my right brain something to do…

My introduction to Shakespeare came over 50 years ago when I was 14. Our high school English teacher gave us an assignment to watch “An Age of Kings,” the BBC’s multi-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays which was being shown on a local television station. I was the only one “dumb” enough to complete the assignment…

I often joke to my husband that he has to share me with William Shakespeare. My first encounter with Will was neither auspicious nor epiphanic. We had to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school when we were eleven years old; frankly I found him rather boring…

Although trash talking may seem like a modern phenomenon, trying to intimidate an opponent with insults and taunts has been going on at least since Moses and the Israelites took on Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Given the foreign and domestic conflicts that persistently troubled Elizabethan England, there can be little doubt that, whatever it might have been called at the time, trash talking was also a regular occurrence during Shakespeare’s lifetime. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Shakespeare himself used trash talking frequently and effectively throughout his plays…

No Shakespeare enthusiast’s trip to Southwark would be complete without a trip to the Globe, both in its original location and its current reconstructed one at Shakespeare’s Globe. True Shakespeare completists, however, won’t want to miss an opportunity to see the Rose, the site of the first Elizabethan theatre to be built in Bankside and the place where several of Shakespeare’s earliest plays premiered…

Southwark Cathedral continues a history of more than a thousand years during which religious buildings have occupied the same site on the south bank of London’s river Thames. Saxon foundations were discovered during an archaeological dig in 1999, The Domesday Book (1086) alludes to a monasterium (‘minster’) at Southwark, and this monasterium became the priory church of St Marie. Following a fire, the church was rebuilt by 1273; the present Cathedral is the earliest surviving Gothic building in London…