Austin Tichenor

“It’s no wonder that The Crown — nominated for a record six Golden Globes in this Sunday’s annual awards ceremony — is so successful and popular,” writes Austin Tichenor. “Its depiction of an English monarch struggling to rule Britain while…

Shakespeare quotes can seem like good choices for Valentine’s Day cards, but his tales of love are nuanced and complicated.

The story of the Globe Theatre’s beginnings is one of intrigue, legal hairsplitting, holiday opportunity, and the disassembly of another playhouse.

Austin Tichenor writes about how the lack of biographical details about Shakespeare’s life leaves his audience always wanting more.

Chaotic and ineffective government may be a problem in our current life, but it makes for excellent drama in the theater — and in William Shakespeare’s hands, excellent comedy as well.

One of the lasting achievements of the extended COVID quarantine will surely be an extraordinary archive of the complete works of William Shakespeare performed on Zoom by casts from around the world, under the umbrella title The Show Must Go…

Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s…

Austin Tichenor writes about theater’s limitations as a historical record, given its dramatic needs and narrative imperatives.

  Cyril Walter Hodges. The fire at the Globe, 1613 (illustration for: Shakespeare’s Theatre, 1964). Folger Shakespeare Library. While William Shakespeare never wrote what we might think of as a science-fiction play, he knew intuitively that the theatre — more…

Photograph by Lizzie Caswall Smith of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library. During this global pandemic, when the whole world is quarantined to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Hamlet seems like a character perfectly suited to…

Speed reading Launce’s letter : / J. Gilbert ; W. Thomas, sc. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. ART File S528t7 no.10 (size XS)All right, enough. We’ve all heard how super-productive William Shakespeare was when the plague shut down his theaters:…

Brutus (Anthony Cochrane, left) and Julius Caesar (Michael Sharon, right), Julius Caesar, directed by Robert Richmond, Folger Theatre, 2014. Photo by Teresa Wood. In 1599, in the 40th year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when she had no heir or obvious…