Last night my wife couldn’t sleep so I read her a story. Then I had to read her another one because the first one wasn’t conducive to restful dreams. Both came from the Bluemoose collection Seaside Special, edited by Jenn...
Read More“Don’t you bother to blather no more!” How do you go about reviving plays written several centuries before Shakespeare was born? Many medieval towns had sequences of ‘mystery plays’ based on stories in the Bible. Of the few to...
Read MoreMost of the surviving mystery plays come from the North. Mystery doesn’t just mean divine mystery, it’s also an old word for ‘craft’ because craft guilds in various towns put on plays which became both a celebration of God and...
Read MoreThe German traveller Paul Henzner, visiting London just before Shakespeare’s Globe opened, counted ‘above thirty’ heads of traitors on spikes on gate at the south end of London Bridge. This summer’s pop-up Shakespeare’s Rose...
Read MoreHer mother, the pioneer radical and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died after giving birth to her and young Mary Godwin grew up having to pass the room she died in every day. Her father taught her to read by tracing her name on...
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