Project MUSE®: Shakespeare Bulletin - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Shakespeare Bulletin.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 24 (2006) through current issueLatest Articles: Shakespeare BulletinTWOProject MUSE®Shakespeare Bulletin1931-14270748-2558Latest articles in Shakespeare Bulletin. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Critical Caste Studies and Shakespearean Cinemas: Reading Iru, a South Indian Film Adaptation of Othello
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985847
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One of the less well-known but most significant Shakespeare adaptations of the past decade is Iru (dir. Varghese Lal, 2023). This Malayalam-language reworking of Othello is Lal's debut feature and was produced in collaboration with Shakespeare scholar Jose K. Manuel, activist Girish Ram Kumar, and cinematographer and editor Sidhartha Siva, known for films with a social conscience content.1 The film's title—Iru—derives from the seventh letter of the Malayalam alphabet, ഋ, also the initial of the protagonist's name, Rishi (pronounced "IruShi"). A committed participant in student politics, Rishi/Othello is a postgraduate student from a lower caste/lower class Dalit background. Deriving originally from the Sanskrit
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallCritical Caste Studies and Shakespearean Cinemas: Reading Iru, a South Indian Film Adaptation of Othello2026-03-24text/htmlen-USCritical Caste Studies and Shakespearean Cinemas: Reading Iru, a South Indian Film Adaptation of Othello2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1213792026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Theater History, Textual Provenance, and Lostness: The Case of Satiromastix
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985848
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To the enduring question posed by Janette Dillon, "is there a performance in this text?", we should add a rider: what kind of staging lies behind an extant witness?1 Dillon's essay, published thirty years ago, addressed an emerging trend in Shakespeare studies, what she termed "an orthodoxy of performance" (74) that aimed to displace the traditional focus on the author-figure in favor of the play's theatrical realization. While more recently a number of scholars have turned their attention to agency further along the bibliographical axis, exploring the role the printing house played in constructing the reader's experience of drama,2 here I would like to retrace our steps and revisit Dillon's enquiry from another
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallTheater History, Textual Provenance, and Lostness: The Case of Satiromastix2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTheater History, Textual Provenance, and Lostness: The Case of Satiromastix2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1120082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24"My Cycloptic Ways": An Interview with Aidan O'Reilly and Vanessa Morosco
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985849
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Aidan O'Reilly. Photo by Ariel Tatum, courtesy of Aidan O'Reilly.Please can we begin by you introducing yourselves and your professional backgrounds, both as individual artists and within the ASC specifically?I'm Aidan O'Reilly, and I was born in San Francisco. I got my B.A. with honors from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and I'm actually the first disabled individual to graduate from that school. Then I started working [at the ASC] right after college, so it would have been 2008, and I've worked here on and off kind of since then. I took a big break between 2016 and 2021 or 2022, and worked a lot for the Utah Shakespeare Festival and the Prague Shakespeare Company in the Czech Republic, and just kind of moved
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmall"My Cycloptic Ways": An Interview with Aidan O'Reilly and Vanessa Morosco2026-03-24text/htmlen-US"My Cycloptic Ways": An Interview with Aidan O'Reilly and Vanessa Morosco2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®572592026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24To Gender or Not to Gender: Casting and Characters for 21st Century Shakespeare by Margaret J. Oakes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985850
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"It's ladies' night," announced one reviewer of Jennifer Tang's 2025 gender-swapped Cymbeline at Shakespeare's Globe (Wolf). Like several other reviews of the production, it expresses—in a patronizing tone—a latent resistance to nontraditional gender casting practices. These practices and the diverse responses to them are the subject of Margaret Oakes's To Gender or Not to Gender: Casting and Characters for 21st Century Shakespeare. Starting from the premise "there is no such thing as a 'gender blind' audience" (67), Oakes examines moments of interpretive friction between "post gender" performances and their gender-conscious audiences (17). To Gender or Not to Gender is not revolutionary in its thinking, but it is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallTo Gender or Not to Gender: Casting and Characters for 21st Century Shakespeare by Margaret J. Oakes (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTo Gender or Not to Gender: Casting and Characters for 21st Century Shakespeare by Margaret J. Oakes (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®148952026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage ed. by Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985851
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that post-2016 it is difficult—if not impossible—to study nationhood in early modern Britain without considering the specter of Brexit. It is not radical to observe that England's fraught relationship with continental Europe precedes the Brexit vote by centuries. Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo's collection None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage engages directly with this relationship, taking seriously the ways in which Brexit and rising neonationalist movements across the globe offer inevitable and "significant frames through which to read early modern drama" (7). The introduction contextualizes the range of conflicting and contradictory
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallNone a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage ed. by Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USNone a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage ed. by Scott Oldenburg and Matteo Pangallo (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®144332026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Hamlet dir. by Joanna Carrick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985852
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How does one reconcile a tragedy about betrayal, murder, and existential dread with a company mission to be "accessible and fun for all" ("Theatre in the Forest")? That is the question that Joanna Carrick, Founder and Artistic Director of Red Rose Chain Theatre Company, sought to answer with her 2025 production of Hamlet for the company's annual Theatre in the Forest event. Each summer, Red Rose Chain are in residence for a month at Sutton Hoo, an Anglo-Saxon burial ground in Suffolk, performing an open-air Shakespeare play every evening. Accessibility is central to Theatre in the Forest's endeavor. While not exclusively aimed at children, their productions foreground "high energy, dance, music, colour and magic"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallHamlet dir. by Joanna Carrick (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHamlet dir. by Joanna Carrick (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®150712026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Hamlet Hail to the Thief dir. by Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985853
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Hamlet is essentially a play about a prince whose father's murder leads to the usurpation of the throne and throws the world around him into chaos. Hail to the Thief, Radiohead's 2003 album, is a reflection on the fraught US presidential election of 2000. It is an album about what happens when the democratic processes we've always felt able to trust fall apart. It's about what happens when our leaders deceive us and when we fool ourselves into thinking that we live in a world in which justice naturally prevails, and where we find ourselves hailing a "thief."In these ways and more, the play and the album intertwined in Hamlet Hail to the Thief, speaking to one another. When Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke joined the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallHamlet Hail to the Thief dir. by Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHamlet Hail to the Thief dir. by Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®142992026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Hamlet dir. by Robert O'Hara (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985854
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In his remarks during the opening night of Robert O'Hara's Hamlet, the artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, Snehal Desai, recalled his surprise upon hearing that O'Hara wanted to direct Hamlet. According to Desai, O'Hara explained his desires simply: "I have some questions about the play." Hamlet asks questions of its characters, performers, scholars, and, most of all, its audiences from its very first line: "Who's there?" (1.1.1). Despite the play's long legacy of theatrical and film productions, adaptations and appropriations, translations and scholarship, the questions persist. O'Hara's Los Angeles-based production took a new approach to asking these questions, setting the play in present-day
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallHamlet dir. by Robert O'Hara (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USHamlet dir. by Robert O'Hara (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®148762026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Julius Caesar dir. by Rosa Joshi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985855
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The 2025 season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF)—its ninetieth—opened with Rosa Joshi's production of Julius Caesar in the Angus Bowmer Theatre, the larger of the festival's indoor stages. This marks OSF's fourth collaboration with upstart crow collective, following Bring Down the House (a version of the Henry VI plays) in 2020, King John in 2022 (reviewed in Shakespeare Bulletin 42.2), and Coriolanus in 2024. All of these, like Julius Caesar, were directed by Joshi, and all were performed by all-women and non-binary casts drawn from racially diverse backgrounds—actors who clearly relished the opportunity to play central roles usually reserved for men.Julius Caesar (Kate Wisniewski) and Calpurnia (Caroline
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallJulius Caesar dir. by Rosa Joshi (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USJulius Caesar dir. by Rosa Joshi (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®138072026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Othello dir. by Tim Carroll (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985856
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Othello, is, at heart, a tragedy of words—such was the impression I received while attending Tim Carroll's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the autumn of 2024. Through the abstract use of space and the careful deployment of scenic and technical elements, Carroll's production repeatedly drew attention back to the power of the spoken word to enact change on its surroundings.The costumes were striking, intricately detailed garb circa 1605. In contrast to the lavish attire, the set design was minimalist and abstract, including two backgrounds: a trio of curtains made of long dark threads descended from the ceiling for certain scenes, and a gold-colored panel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallOthello dir. by Tim Carroll (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USOthello dir. by Tim Carroll (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®140422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Merchants of Venice dir. by Sung-youl Lee (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985857
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The National Changgeuk Company of Korea's The Merchants of Venice premiered for a short run in June 2023. Despite the ensuing war in Gaza and the global attention on the issue of antisemitism, however, it was revived in June 2025 for an enthusiastically received and fully sold-out run at the 1,200-seat National Theatre in Seoul, where I saw it. As the choral finale of this musical adaptation celebrated the victory over Shylock, the audience joined in by clapping along and even standing. What enabled this perhaps surprising phenomenon was not Korean unawareness of global affairs, but changes wrought on the original play, beginning with the title. This production pitted small business owners (Merchants) against a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallThe Merchants of Venice dir. by Sung-youl Lee (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Merchants of Venice dir. by Sung-youl Lee (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®158702026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Twelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985858
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From September 2023 to July 2025, New York City's Delacorte Theater in Central Park was closed to undergo the first major renovation of the venue since it opened in 1962. The production which marked the theater's reopening, Saheem Ali's Twelfth Night, in many ways offered a statement of intent for the future of the Public Theater's Free Shakespeare in the Park seasons. Both individually and together, the two reviews of Ali's production commissioned by Shakespeare Bulletin which follow reflect the importance of this moment in Shakespearean performance in the United States in 2025.Saheem Ali's production of Twelfth Night followed a year-long renovation of the Delacorte Theater that necessitated the venue's closure
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallTwelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTwelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®147912026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Twelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985859
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On a moonlit August night, the revitalized Delacorte Theatre re-opened with a musical, sparkling, rainbow show. As made explicit in the curtain speeches by Patrick Willingham, Executive Director of The Public Theater, and Gale A. Brewer, New York's City Council member for District 6, which includes Central Park, this "Free Shakespeare" representation of New York's vibrant diversity and commitment to the arts was a happy defiance of Donald Trump's nonstop attempts to turn America into a white hetero-nationalist plastic dystopia. Although the play was understandably advertised as Twelfth Night, the set that dominated the stage throughout consisted of illuminated thirteen-foot-high block letters spelling out "WHAT YOU
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallTwelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTwelfth Night dir. by Saheem Ali (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®148812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Sabbas Shakespeare dir. by Rupayan Mukherjee and Agneyo De Sarkar (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985860
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Sabbas Shakespeare was staged against the backdrop of a tense judiciopolitical milieu that had devastated both the guilty and the non-guilty with equal blows. In April 2025, the Supreme Court of India released a verdict that declared the entire cohort of teaching and non-teaching staff, who had been selected by the state of West Bengal School Service Commission in 2016, to be inauthentic. Around 26,000 people were terminated from their employment overnight. In protest against this indiscriminate and unjustified elimination of jobs, many people took to the streets to express their discontent.Against this backdrop of acute educational crisis, the Department of English of Acharya Brojendra Nath Seal College, situated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallSabbas Shakespeare dir. by Rupayan Mukherjee and Agneyo De Sarkar (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USSabbas Shakespeare dir. by Rupayan Mukherjee and Agneyo De Sarkar (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®159042026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Romeo and Juliet dir. by Sean Holmes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985861
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Director Sean Holmes's production of Romeo and Juliet brought the Wild West to the Globe Theatre in London. Paul Wills's set design was an all-wooden saloon, furnished with old-fashioned saloon doors center stage, stage right, and stage left. Four wooden chairs lined up along the upstage wall to face the audience. One of them was noticeably placed in front of a series of bloodied handprints on the back wall, unsubtly foreshadowing the violent turn the play would take. The blend of kitsch and violence embedded in the set reflected the tone of the overall production, as the Capulets and Montagues were turned into boisterous cowboys whose laughs were as frequent as their guns were near. While the Western setting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallRomeo and Juliet dir. by Sean Holmes (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USRomeo and Juliet dir. by Sean Holmes (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®133182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Two Gentlemen of Verona dir. by Aidan O'Reilly (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985862
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Even in the preshow entertainment, the American Shakespeare Center's (ASC) staging of The Two Gentlemen of Verona displayed a buoyant façade that belied dark elements of Shakespeare's early comedy, which were preserved but softened. Consistent with ASC's established practice, the cast warmed up the house before the show's start by entering with drums and guitars to perform several classic love songs: "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes, "Happy Together" by the Turtles, and "Honey, Honey" by ABBA. These tunes spoke to romantic themes of the play, and they were delivered with infectious energy, inspiring many in the audience to clap and stomp along. When considered as a precursor to the plot of Two Gentlemen, however, some
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallThe Two Gentlemen of Verona dir. by Aidan O'Reilly (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Two Gentlemen of Verona dir. by Aidan O'Reilly (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®122072026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Twelfth Night dir. by Brian Isaac Phillips (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985863
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Brian Isaac Phillips began his Twelfth Night with an opening monologue delivered by Jeremy Dubin introducing the production's setting: an outside post-apocalyptic world where artistic creation was banned and the practice of theater outlawed. Phillips set Twelfth Night as a play-within-a-play, put on by a group of underground thespians living under an unidentified fascist regime. Dubin delivered his opening monologue in the style of an emcee—not yet in the role of Feste he would later take on, but as an unnamed member of this underground troupe. A cryptic knock interrupted Dubin's monologue; he checked the time, suggesting a process of routine, and quickly went to return the knock on the upstage barrier—a worn and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/339/image/coversmallTwelfth Night dir. by Brian Isaac Phillips (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USTwelfth Night dir. by Brian Isaac Phillips (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®130482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24