McKellen regaled the crowd with “X-Men” and “Lord of the Rings” anecdotes along with various Shakespearean monologues. At one point, he played both parts of the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet.”
https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/01/30/ian-mckellen-enchants-chicago-students-with-tales-of-x-men-and-shakespeare/
McKellen regaled the crowd with “X-Men” and “Lord of the Rings” anecdotes along with various Shakespearean monologues. At one point, he played both parts of the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet.”
https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/01/30/ian-mckellen-enchants-chicago-students-with-tales-of-x-men-and-shakespeare/
You know, we have so many questions about #Denmark and everybody wants to play that king ... wait ... wasn't it #shakespeare we do need a pause in world politics! Just a little bit more theatre 🤭 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQULEW2JwHE
You know, we have so many questions about #Denmark and everybody wants to play that king ... wait ... wasn't it #shakespeare we do need a pause in world politics! Just a little bit more theatre 🤭 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQULEW2JwHE
Hmmm.... Could this become my favorite bot in the Fediverse?
🆕 blog! “Book Review: The Real Shakespeare - Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet”
★⯪☆☆☆
Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review.
Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/01/book-review-the-real-shakespeare-emilia-bassano-willoughby-by-irene-coslet/
⸻
#NetGalley #ShakeRace #shakespeare
🆕 blog! “Book Review: The Real Shakespeare - Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet”
★⯪☆☆☆
Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review.
Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/01/book-review-the-real-shakespeare-emilia-bassano-willoughby-by-irene-coslet/
⸻
#NetGalley #ShakeRace #shakespeare
#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 2: Talk about something you’ve retold.
"What You Will: A Queer-er Shakespeare" is a re-telling of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with the queer turned up to 11.
If you aren't familiar with Shakespeare, it may surprise you that he was a very queer writer. There's decent evidence based on his sonnets that the man was bisexual and had a specific man who was, if not his lover, than at least his muse.
And Twelfth Night was his queerest play.
It's also my favorite (not entirely because of it's inherent queerness). But, all the queerness is implied. Very loudly implied in some cases, but still... and I could make an argument that Orsino and Viola's relationship is the first known case of queer baiting, because the whole play is Orsino falling in love with who he thinks is a man, then at the very end Viola is revealed to actually be a woman, and Orsino is like, 'wonderful, let's get married.' And suddenly the implied queer relationship is a-ok because it was never queer in the first place!
Gag.
So I decided one day to retell the play as prose (I intended novel, but it ended up being novella length). I used all the original dialog with only a few mostly small changes, made Viola a trans egg who never goes back to living as a woman, and made... well, if you're interested in the rest, here's a link, you can check it out:
confused that Alexis Denisov in Joss Whedon's _Much Ado About Nothing_ seems to have an American accent. #Shakespeare
(streaming on Tubi, along with Keneth Branagh's version.)
Viola loves Orsino
Orsino loves Olivia
Olivia loves Cesario
Cesario is Viola…
Or is it the other way around?
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a queer play. But what if you could make it queer-er?
What You Will, a Queer-er Shakespeare.
Now available
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C815H9DY
Other retailers: https://books2read.com/u/4D8qkQ
Viola loves Orsino
Orsino loves Olivia
Olivia loves Cesario
Cesario is Viola…
Or is it the other way around?
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a queer play. But what if you could make it queer-er?
What You Will, a Queer-er Shakespeare.
Now available
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C815H9DY
Other retailers: https://books2read.com/u/4D8qkQ
Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad blockers when they are online. That’s a testament to the importance many people attach to being in control of their browser experience, and to a wide dislike of the ads they are forced to view. The 2022 case concerned […]
#accessibility #adBlockers #adblock #beethoven #bgh #competitionLaw #eu #eyeo #germany #mozilla #phishing #privacy #rembrandt #shakespeare #springer #surveillance #tracking
Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad blockers when they are online. That’s a testament to the importance many people attach to being in control of their browser experience, and to a wide dislike of the ads they are forced to view. The 2022 case concerned […]
#accessibility #adBlockers #adblock #beethoven #bgh #competitionLaw #eu #eyeo #germany #mozilla #phishing #privacy #rembrandt #shakespeare #springer #surveillance #tracking
This week’s archive article is a considerably sillier one, with Jubal diving into the world of Shakespeare, mashing famous plays up with famous modern films, and then seeing what the resulting plots might look like…
You can read “Shakespeare: The Expanded Film Universe” here:
https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=116720
Do give us a boost if you know anyone else who might enjoy this! :)
This week’s archive article is a considerably sillier one, with Jubal diving into the world of Shakespeare, mashing famous plays up with famous modern films, and then seeing what the resulting plots might look like…
You can read “Shakespeare: The Expanded Film Universe” here:
https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=116720
Do give us a boost if you know anyone else who might enjoy this! :)
Viola loves Orsino
Orsino loves Olivia
Olivia loves Cesario
Cesario is Viola…
Or is it the other way around?
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a queer play. But what if you could make it queer-er?
What You Will, a Queer-er Shakespeare. Now available
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C815H9DY
Viola loves Orsino
Orsino loves Olivia
Olivia loves Cesario
Cesario is Viola…
Or is it the other way around?
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a queer play. But what if you could make it queer-er?
What You Will, a Queer-er Shakespeare. Now available
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C815H9DY
It seems fashionable in the Anglophone literary world to deprecate plots that depend on misunderstanding and I'm not sure why--aren't they a staple of white Anglo classics like the works of #Shakespeare and #JaneAusten? 🤔 I guess there are a ton of cases where the misunderstanding is kind of meh and written in for plot convenience more than anything intrinsic to the characters and the world, but like any other plot element it can be handled well or poorly.
Personally I love a compelling misunderstanding where misinterpretation and crossed signals arise out of circumstances central to the story like "civil blood mak[ing] civil hands unclean," (Romeo and Juliet) or because honest communication about subjects like romantic yearnings is so high-stakes it's basically impossible, especially for women (much of Jane Austen).
And maybe there's a tendency to kind of sneer at this because these stories took place in the Olden Days(TM) of whalebone corsets and slavery and people are supposed to be above all that now. The last time I checked misunderstanding didn't die out with the advent of industrialization, though, unlike passenger pigeons and dodos (too soon?). Despite the enlightenment and freedoms constantly touted to us, how much goes unspoken and undared, dropped, forgotten and (un)missed in the odd spaces that open up between our fragile forms? Which, and whose, silences and misapprehensions do the loadbearing work in our lives?
I think these questions of misunderstanding and miscommunication are worth exploring in any age, especially if books are optimized for exploring inner lives as seems to be another common consensus in Anglophone lit crowds. (Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Beowulf among others might disagree, but hey, they're old news and drawn from oral tradition so they get filed differently maybe? 🤷♀️)
