William Shakespeare

Richard III
by William Shakespeare
Direction: Thomas Ostermeier
Translation and version by Marius von Mayenburg

Richard is hideous. Born prematurely, he is a deformed, hobbling, hunchbacked cripple who, on the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses – which flared up after the death of Henry V – served his family and above all his brother, Edward, well. Now Edward is king, thanks to a number of murders carried out on his crippled brother’s own initiative. But the end of war brings Richard no peace. His hatred for the rest of the world, to which he will never belong, lies too deep. And so he does what he does best and kills some more, clearing away every obstacle that lies in his path to becoming king. If fate prevents him from being part of a society of those blessed by good fortune, he will at least lord over them. He plays off his rivals against each other with political cunning, unscrupulously exploits the ambitions of others for his own ends and strides spotless through an immense bloodbath until there is no one left above him and the crown is his.Read More »

The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare: 38 Fully-Dramatized Plays by William Shakespeare (Author), Eileen Atkins (Narrator), Joseph Fiennes (Narrator), Sir John Gielgud (Narrator), Emily Woof (Narrator)

The Complete Shakespeare for the 21st Century . This release is of major importance: for the first time all of Shakespeare’s plays are available on CD in a single set, produced by a single creative team with an extraordinary cast, with the utmost attention to detail to guarantee a listening experience that’s accessible and enjoyable.

Arkangel Productions brings together the best of academic and entertainment industry expertise. Tom Treadwell, a university professor who specialized in Elizabethan drama, and Bill Shepherd from the world of film and TV production, worked with Clive Brill, a former BBC director/producer, to make their vision a reality. Their goal was, simply, to produce Shakespeare for the 21st Century , the definitive, ultimate audio Shakespeare. This is it – they have achieved their goal.

The creative team designed a sophisticated layering of sound and music to provide a complete audio environment. Music was composed by Dominique Le Gendre, whose award-winning talents matched the art of the performers. All the plays were recorded at one of London?s leading studios. The Sound House.Read More »

Making its debut with Romeo and Juliet on 3 December 1978, and concluding nearly seven years later with Titus Andronicus on 27 April 1985, the BBC Television Shakespeare project was the single most ambitious attempt at bringing the Bard of Avon to the small screen, both at the time and to date.

Producer Cedric Messina was already an experienced producer of one-off television Shakespeare presentations, and was thus ideally qualified to present the BBC with a daunting but nonetheless enticingly simple proposition: a series of adaptations, staged specifically for television, of all 36 First Folio plays, plus Pericles (The Two Noble Kinsmen was considered primarily John Fletcher’s work, and the legitimacy of Edward III was still being debated).

The scale of Messina’s proposal, far greater than that of previous multi-part Shakespeare series such as An Age of Kings (BBC, 1960) and Spread of the Eagle (BBC, 1963), required an American partner in order to guarantee access to the US market, deemed essential for the series to recoup its costs. Time-Life Television agreed to participate, but under certain controversial conditions – that the productions be traditional interpretations of the plays in appropriately Shakespearean period costumes and sets, designed to fit a two-and-a-half-hour time slot.Read More »

Making its debut with Romeo and Juliet on 3 December 1978, and concluding nearly seven years later with Titus Andronicus on 27 April 1985, the BBC Television Shakespeare project was the single most ambitious attempt at bringing the Bard of Avon to the small screen, both at the time and to date.Read More »

I could be bounded in a nutshell and call myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams…

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Hamlet is a 1996 film version of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, adapted for the screen and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars in the titular role as Prince Hamlet. The film also features Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Richard Briers as Polonius, and Nicholas Farrell as Horatio. Other notable appearances include Robin Williams, Gérard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud and Ken Dodd.Read More »

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Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is a zesty version of the classic comedy, highlighted by performances by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and Nino Rota’s score. Instead of simply filming a play, Zeffirelli turned Shakespeare’s text into a lively, cinematic movie, with sweeping sets and cinematography. Set in Padua, Italy in the late 1500s, the story concerns the shy Bianca (Natasha Pyne) and the mean-spirited Katarina (Elizabeth Taylor), the two daughters of a rich merchant named Baptista (Michael Hordern). Though Bianca is being courted by a number of young men, Baptista announces that she may not marry until Katarina is wed. Read More »

A film about “no thing” and everything, as Shakespeare the Fifth (Peter Sellars) tries to reclaim humanity’s lost artworks after Chernobyl—but not before crossing paths with a gangster Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his Cordelia (Molly Ringwald). One of Godard’s most densely layered inquiries into the discord between sound and image. Featuring Woody Allen and Leos Carax.Read More »