The Latest Breaking News from Shakespeare

The bruising exploration of politics, power and civic identity plays out in front of an audience split into two sides for Bell Shakespeare’s take

Peter Pan has a pop fantasy, Faustus is in Africa, Brian Cox leads a banking satire and Billy Connolly meets the late Alasdair Gray. Elsewhere, the joy of pickling, a landmark jazz album and Elton John’s libel case take centre stage

Staff at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich say the authors were introduced as part of a ‘genuine diversification’ of the curriculum

Small, huge, camp, Star Trek-themed … weddings have changed beyond recognition, but we’re still reading out the same old Shakespeare sonnets. What to read at a modern ceremony? Plus, leading poets pick their favourites

The passing of celebrated Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on 28 May 2025 marks the end of a remarkable period in African literary history – the fabulous decades in the second half of the 20th century when African writers came to command the world stage.

Brief letters: Art review | ‘Worser’ in Shakespeare | Youth hostelling | Driverless taxis | Egregious Americanism | Outage outrage

The new musical film Juliet and Romeo arrives on screen with lavish visuals, saccharine pop songs and a reworked Shakespearean plot that tries to dazzle. With its vivid colour palette and dreamy masquerade aesthetic, this is Verona as filtered through a Eurovision lens: glittering, melodramatic and frequently overwrought.

With bare-faced cheek, this bardless take replaces all the original language with olden-days-effect prose – adding singing, dancing and a pointlessly starry cast

Letters: Readers share their views on the evolution of the English language, in response to an article by Elisabeth Ribbans on the use of ‘gotten’

Seeing the RSC’s breathtaking 1978 production of The Taming of the Shrew showed how a working-class boy like me could get into theatre

If only Shakespeare could read these.