Happy Birthday to William Shakespeare, born on this day in 1564. Today is also the anniversary of the Bard’s death. Dare I say it? Dying on your birthday is a dramatically Shakespearean thing to do. When a young group of artists founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 they drew up a list of ‘Immortals’, made up of artists and historical…
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death… —Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28) I’ve just read Variety’s review of the new adaptation of the Scottish play. I can not wait to see this.…
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Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth
Today marks the birthday of John Singer Sargent in 1856. So I thought I’d share one of my favorite works of his, Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Victorian actress Ellen Terry fascinates me and in a previous blog post about her memoirs, I shared her own words on the Lady Macbeth costume, which I will also include here. It…
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Pre-Raphaelites and Shakespeare: The Death of Lady Macbeth
Macbeth is such a powerful play that we fear invoking the name of it in the theatre. It’s one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and with so many dramatic elements, I’m surprised that the Pre-Raphaelites did not illustrate it more. Murder, greed, ambition, fear…Macbeth has it all. The Rossetti drawing above is a preliminary study for a painting that he intended…
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Dame Ellen Terry
My interest in Dame Ellen Terry takes me to a period a bit later than the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Born into an acting family, Terry married painter George Frederic Watts when she was sixteen which introduced her to the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson and other luminaries of the Victorian era. I recently read her memoirs, available for free at…
