In 1966, Broadway impresario Harold Hecuba stunned critics and audiences alike when he staged Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a musical. Hecuba’s audacious move created a sensation and the Hamlet musical was a hit. The celebration soon was overshadowed by scandal, though, when a group of mostly amateur actors claimed to have not only written the musical... Continue Reading →
The Stratfordians. The Oxfordians. Baconians and Marlovians. What sounds like the breakout of Illuminati frat houses is actually something a lot stranger. These sects war over a secret at the root of possibly the greatest cover-up in literary history: that William Shakespeare was, in fact, not the great author William Shakespeare and the aristocracy of... Continue Reading →
Giuseppe Verdi’s version of “more cowbell” looks something like an entire chorus of witches in Macbeth versus the Bard’s three. In 1597, King James of Scotland wrote a work of what he considered to be definitive scholarship: Daemonologie, a paper on witchcraft. James, widely regarded by self and others to be an expert on the... Continue Reading →