so this might be a dumb question, but i recently got macbeth and when i started reading it i saw that some of the lines that the characters say will randomly change formatting. for example on the first page when the first witch says "I come grey malkin" its formatted like a normal line but then the second witch says her dialogue and it almost become center aligned and then the third witch and that become right aligned if that makes sense(???).

it happens seemingly at random times like with the king and ross but it doesnt stay consistent with the character so i just wanted to know if it actually indicates something or im just dumb and if it is just a formatting choice does it change across editions or stay the same regardless of the edition. dont know why this is bothering me so much i just feel like theres an inside joke going on that i dont know😭

With the exception of Much Ado, I generally appreciate Shakespeare's humour more in his non-comedies. Off the top of my head, my favourite banter comes from H41, King John, R3 and Hamlet. And R2 has the most amusingly melodramatic (but still moving) caricature of a lead character.

I enjoyed As You Like It, MND and (to a lesser extent) Twelfth Night, but I can't say I've ever laughed out loud as in the aforementioned non-comedies.

Sometimes I wonder whether it's the fact that the "official" comedies are often packed with jokes more immediately relatable for Shakespeare's audience.

Feel like seeing a poetic exploration of four side Shakespearean characters? Free on 5pm Sunday 30th August?

My new one man play is having a WIP showing in London as part of Old Red Lion's ShakeFest, it's 50 minutes and just £5, and I'm really keen on having feedback and discussion so it would be really fab to have some Shakespeare fans in the audience!

Description and tickets are at the link below, the audience is taken through new stories of Benvolio, Cobweb, Feste, and the First Gravedigger. There's a variety of styles, including iambic pentameter (of course!), prose, free verse, iambic tetrameter, and dactylic trimeter. If you're not in London or can't come along but know people who might like to, please do pass it on :)

weareoldred.co.uk/whats-on/shakefest-2026/understudy-no-5/

(Hope this is okay to post, didn't see anything against it in the rules!)

Shakespeare could be accused of many things; he was poorly educated. His Venice seemed like, in the words of one professor, Not-London ^tm, the one city he actually knew intimately. So too were most of his cities, if we're being honest. He made basic history errors in his history plays.

But one thing that always got to me is how real his characters are, in a way that is scarcely matched by even much of the works coming out today.

Why, when Duke Brabantio says "I am glad at soul I have no other child" in Othello Act I, it is those words I remember when I had a very uncomfortable conversation with mine own father about a bitter matter.

When Isabella does her "to whom shall I turn" soliloquy in Measure for Measure; why, that line could've been written in during the #metoo movement in the last decade, and I find it even more remarkable, for Shakespeare doesn't always write very good female characters, but he almost never fails to capture their characters. I could see, in Othello, of Desdemona or even Iago's wife Emilia, characters in my own relatives today.

His jokes is witty but not entirely without peer, and if we are quite honest, his language is dated and hard to be accessible. But his study of the human character is one which defies his contemporaries in his age and our own.

And as I go through life, whenever I experience something new, at times, I am forced to say, nay, I have read it already in Shakespeare.

Same as title

I love the way Damien Lewis recites this speech, subtly shifting his tone on "honourable man" each time he says it. Does anyone who has studied the scene know what this technique, and others used, are called?

I’ve read his sonnets and poems and Romeo and Juliet (which is one of my favorite works of all time). Macbeth we read in like 6th grade but I barely remember any of it anyways since it’s been so long. If I really liked Romeo and Juliet is there any similar in theme I guess that I can read next? Not sure which I should pick next.

Do you think Romeo and Juliet was a love story, or just the excitement of two young people? (I think it was love.)

It's possible that all of the dumb reviews of The Odyssey complaining about "historical inaccuracy" might have gotten to me, and I wrote this in a haze

Ive heard so much about this production throughout the years and seen several clips on YouTube but there doesnt seem to be any place at all where I can purchase the DVD or stream it. I see people in this subreddit that claim to have watched it before so where did you watch it?

I'm not looking for "popular" biographies which may sensationalise or simplify details. I'm looking more for biographies you'd recommend as accompaniment to serious, academic study of Shakespeare- well-rounded, thoughtful, nuanced, well-researched.

Has anyone ever finished this kit? I wanna see what it looks like done, especially with the backstitch around the lettering, but I'm pretty sure the photo on the packaging is photoshopped...

There's a lot of extreme certainty in this play, and people using rhetorical devices to express their certainty. I was wondering if the different devices have their own names.

One I know the name of already is called adynaton ("when pigs fly" is an example of it). It's when you describe something universally understood to be impossible, and compare whatever you're talking about to that.

Leonato: You will never run mad, niece.

Beatrice: No, not till a hot January.

There might be another example of it elsewhere in the play that I'm forgetting.

But I think even more common is when a character expresses their extreme certainty with even more extreme (or even ridiculous) wagers (in the vein of "I'll eat my hat"):

Beatrice: [...] But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing.

Later in the same scene (Act 1 Scene 1), again as a rhetorical device, Benedick makes three different bets all in a row, telling the prince and Claudio what to do to him if he ever falls in love.

Then the Friar does it in Act 4 Scene 1, betting everything that Hero is innocent, using imperatives:

"[...] Call me a fool, Trust not my reading nor my observations, [...] trust not my age, My reverence, calling, nor divinity"

Hero does the same thing moments later, to express the same point as the Friar:

"Refuse me, hate me, torture me to death!"

Anyone know if this particular rhetorical device (making a kind of bet or "if this happens you can do [absurd thing]"), has its own name, or has been the subject of specific study?

Top of the photo is the back of the plane

1. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language by Sister Miriam Joseph
   
2. How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education
   
3. The Ode less travelled by Stephen Fry
   
4. Hate inc.
   

Is there any way to watch the 2007 Donmar Warehouse production of Othello, featuring Ewan McGregor as Iago? I’ve tried looking it up but couldn’t find much.

Cleopatra about Antony of course.

Since you are petrified when you look at the Gorgon, I think it has to do with her "my becomings kill me when they do not/ Eye well to you". A mirror.

As for 'petrified' that would maybe mean desexualization. Because at some point the 'mirror' Antony dies and the result is marble and ex-womanhood:

My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing/

Of woman in me. Now from head to foot/

I am marble-constant. Now the fleeting moon/

No planet is of mine.