Bard

Ralph Fiennes ' Coriolanus is not your typical toga-and-sandals Shakespeare. It's camouflage-and-combat boots Shakespeare, it's gritty, it's graffitied. Although the actor and first-time director is faithful to the Bard's text, setting his tale of usurpation and political upheaval in the city-state of Rome, it looks more like Bosnia, or Beirut. Slabs of grim modernist architecture, the rubble and debris of poverty and conflict, TV monitors reporting news of rioting and war - Fiennes' Coriolanus , with its people's uprisings and its uniformed demagogues, its partisan clashes and elitist arrogance, is about as contemporary as it gets.

William Shakespeare never set foot on the Jersey shore in his lifetime. Better late than never. The Bard finally is coming to Cape May next weekend, and - would you believe it? - no one is rushing to mine the beaches. "Shakespeare in Cape May: A Discovery Weekend," April 3-5, a program of the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts, will combine lectures by Shakespeare scholars, a performance workshop by professional actors, a showing of Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet," a discussion of operas based on the Bard (with musical examples)

Shakespeare's on television again tonight. You know what that means. Yea, verily. Time once again to root around the cranial attic for some wistful memories of when you and the Bard used to hang out together around the high school water fountain or student union quadrangle. You feel the need to yank down your dusty collection of Shakespeare's folios and bring your loved ones around the living room campfire for some pre-telecast orientation in these timeless classics. Better realign your reflexes, folksies.

Yes, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but something is also remarkable: Lantern Theater's electrifying production of Hamlet, which opened Tuesday night on a sparse Center City stage that could not seem fuller, and with a cast that could not be finer. William Shakespeare wrote his tragedy almost 410 years ago, but given this smooth, dynamic staging by Lantern's artistic director, Charles McMahon, and this facile interpretation, the Bard could have spun off his longest play while taking a break from bangers and mash just this year.

How would Shakespeare have coped with a Broadway production of one of his earlier comedies during his own lifetime? British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, at 50 already gone by Shakespeare in terms of total output - 37 plays produced to the Bard's 36 ("But will they last 400 years?" he poses cheerily) - lists among the occasional disappointments in his illustrious career his 1971 Broadway debut with the comedy "How the Other Half Loves. " "It was a case of the New York Times smiling with only half its face," he breezes via telephone from Yorkshire, England.

So much of William Shakespeare's life remains shrouded in mystery that the Bard has become a perfect subject for speculative fiction. For some, the ultimate question is "Did Shakespeare actually write his plays?" But Ghana-born screenwriter William Boyd ( Chaplin ) and Scottish TV director John McKay ( Life on Mars , Robin Hood ) are more interested in the Bard's love life, and the effect it had on his poetry. Boyd and McKay are the creative brains behind the breezy, enjoyable, somewhat titillating 2005 British TV drama A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets , now available on DVD from BFS Entertainment ( www.bfsent.

There are few theatrical experiences more transformative than a first encounter with Shakespeare. His portrayal of the human soul in every guise, 400 years on, remains vital and magical. He has birthed generations of theater lovers, and despite the many distractions invented for potential audiences in the years since the Globe Theater's first opening night, he still manages to fill houses across the actual globe. Of course, transformations can go the other way too, and there may be no more scarring dramatic experience than sitting through a long night of bad Shakespeare.

State Rep. Ellen Bard, who is vying for the GOP nomination in the contentious 13th Congressional District race, says that she has always been pro-First Amendment, pro-freedom of the press. But in a memo written to House members on Jan. 26, Bard said that she planned to introduce legislation placing restrictions on the Pennsylvania Shield Law that would require reporters to disclose their sources if they were sued for defamation or invasion of privacy. Bard also said that she would change the Shield Law to create a "presumption" of damages in defamation cases, which would allow plaintiffs to receive financial awards without proving that they had suffered harm.

When Romeo (we're talking the real Romeo - balcony, Verona, love-lamed and all) says his spirit "lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts," does he really need to leap as he says the words lifts me? And what about Juliet's dad? Sure, he's exasperated because his daughter refuses to accept the marriage he's arranged to the noble but passionless Paris - wouldn't you be, if you'd gone to all that trouble? She'd better be in church for the nuptials, he commands, as Juliet sobs at his feet, or "I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.

PITTSBURGH — If you think Shakespeare's works have been performed so often there's not much left to do with them, think again. No one has ever filmed readings of all 154 sonnets by a succession of actors and nonactors in evocative locations around the world, and presented them in the order Shakespeare published them in 1609. Someone is doing it now, however: Jeff Monahan, president of 72nd St. Films in Manhattan and Connellsville, Pa., and Joanna Lowe, founder of Cup-A-Jo Productions in Pittsburgh.

Lantern Theater Company's Romeo and Juliet begins before it begins: fights on the street, stealthy comings and goings, women are grabbed, rich, highborn men are drunk and belligerent. Everyone is armed to the teeth - swords and knives - and then somebody says "peace. " Yeah, right. What a place Verona is: Feuds, duels, and havoc will, as they say, ensue. The young star-crossed lovers will, through their suicides, teach their parents the need for reconciliation. This old, sad story is about two teenagers from warring families who have a moment of joy only to have things go terribly wrong through an agony of mistiming, mistakes, parental commands, and just plain bad luck.

Ralph Fiennes ' Coriolanus is not your typical toga-and-sandals Shakespeare. It's camouflage-and-combat boots Shakespeare, it's gritty, it's graffitied. Although the actor and first-time director is faithful to the Bard's text, setting his tale of usurpation and political upheaval in the city-state of Rome, it looks more like Bosnia, or Beirut. Slabs of grim modernist architecture, the rubble and debris of poverty and conflict, TV monitors reporting news of rioting and war - Fiennes' Coriolanus , with its people's uprisings and its uniformed demagogues, its partisan clashes and elitist arrogance, is about as contemporary as it gets.

Sunday Chamber music In a recital in memory of the late harpist Karin Fuller Capanna, an all-star lineup - pianist Linda Reichert , violinists Diane Monroe and Guillaume Combet , violist Sidney Curtiss , and cellist Rajli Bicolli - will play works by Bach, Jacques Ibert, Richard Festinger, Michael Djupstrom, and Roberto Pace at 3 p.m. at Settlement Music School's Willow Grove branch, 318 Davisville Rd.,...

LONDON - All the world's onstage - a single stage - as theater troupes from around the globe perform all of Shakespeare's plays in three dozen languages in the Bard's symbolic London home. Shakespeare's Globe theater this week announced details of a festival that will see all 37 of William Shakespeare's plays performed in 37 languages, from Urdu to Swahili, over six weeks in 2012. The "Globe to Globe" festival includes companies from six continents, including the world's most populous countries, China and India, and its youngest, South Sudan, which became an independent nation in July.

I'm still laughing. "What's the wherefore? / Every why got a wherefore. " And here's the wherefore of my laughing: The Bomb-itty of Errors , an Off-Broadway hit, then a Philly hit four years ago (nominated for seven Barrymores), is being reprised by 11th Hour Theatre Company. Written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Jason Catalano, Gregory J. Qaiyum, Jeffrey Qaiyum and Erik Weiner (well, you didn't expect one guy to come up with two hours worth of rhymes, did you?), the show is directed by Megan Nicole O'Brien with hilarious precision, and DJ'ed by Mark Valenzuela.

CENTER VALLEY, Pa. - Nobody had a makeup artist in the Elizabethan theater, or a lighting designer, choreographer, or even a director. Or a publicist - although Patrick Mulcahy, the head of the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, has been doing a pretty good job spiriting audiences to the production of The Two Noble Kinsmen , a seldom-produced Shakespeare-John Fletcher collaboration the festival is staging as if it had just been written....

William Shakespeare's comedy All's Well that Ends Well is the more-than-usual stretch. It involves a count who, without apparent reason, is turned off by a woman he's later forced to marry and then abandons - and by the end of the play, deeply loves. But the language is beautiful and in Central Park's Delacorte Theatre these nights, so is the production by the Public Theater, as elegant a Shakespeare as I've seen in some time. The cast nails it, in an evening of hankering and scheming; the pay sets up two different sting operations, one against a buffoon (Reg Rogers)

  It used to be, in these parts, when you wanted to go to the theater during the summer you had mostly the following professional choices: Shakespeare. Shakespeare. More Shakespeare. But things have changed: The Bard nowadays is one of the region's most-produced playwrights all year round - and, with the explosion of the local theater scene, the hot months are offering a much more lavish buffet. Your options extend in all directions and even down to Cape May, where Shore-bound Philadelphians can enjoy shows at two longtime professional stages.

By Arthur Phillips Random House. 384 pp. $26 Reviewed by Rhonda Dickey Late in The Tragedy of Arthur , the King Arthur character laments: "I am no author of my history. " But who is the author of his history? That's the big question in this ambitious, funny skewering of memoirs, literary experts, Shakespeare theories, hunts for provenance, and human foibles throughout the ages. The premise: The narrator, a fictional character named Arthur Phillips, is furiously trying to prevent the publication of a heretofore unknown Shakespeare play, The Tragedy of Arthur , a 1597 quarto edition of which he himself had offered to his publisher.