Today is OFFICIALLY the first day of my Masters’ Studies. It’s sort of a subjective day – It’s not like I am attending classes or tutorials, and I can, more or less, study at my own pace. And I have been starting – albeit slowly – on my own, so while today is the symbolic… Read More Day 1: And so it begins
Back in 2006, I had the opportunity to complete my Honours Specialist qualifications in Drama at the Stratford Summer Intensive offered by OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education – University of Toronto). For those of you not familiar with the qualification process in Ontario, the Honours Specialist designation is meant to indicate that a… Read More Teaching Shakespeare
I came across Shakespeare in the Ruff in the summer of 2012. I had just moved to the Danforth neighbourhood, and while I was out exploring one day, I saw the poster for their production of Two Gents, their re-telling of Two Gentlemen of Verona. I had seen Two Gentlemen of Verona at Stratford a… Read More Seven Plays in Eight Days: Saturday – Richard III
My first encounter with a stage production of Measure for Measure came while I was travelling in Portugal in 2012. If you want to read about that production, you can read the post. The long story short was that I really enjoyed the Portuguese production, as it had a vitality and energy to it that… Read More Seven Plays in Eight Days: Friday Night – Measure for Measure
For the last week or so, the flow of email from the Shakespeare Institute has increased. This has allayed my irrational fears that I had not, in fact, signed up for a post-graduate degree, but had in fact been scammed. I knew Juliet wouldn’t let me down. (Juliet is the Administrator for The Shakespeare Institute,… Read More Reality Sets In
I think it would be fair to sat that, in a contemporary context, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most controversial. It is flat-out anti-semitic, which is of course 100% unacceptable in today’s world, but was pervasive and indeed acceptable in the Elizabethan era… I heard an estimate that in the late 1500s, there were… Read More Seven Plays in Eight Days: Friday Matinee – Merchant of Venice
