The Public’s Hamlet at the Delacorte starts off with a bang: it opens with the “to be or not to be” speech. It makes no sense at all (it occurred to me several hours later that it’s possible that the implication is that Hamlet is world-weary even before the action gets going, or perhaps [...]

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Maybe the reason I didn’t fall head-over-heels for the current, Patrick Stewart-helmed Macbeth is that it’s not my favorite Shakespeare, just as a play—I find it a little long, a little slow; I tend to mix up the tertiary characters; I have trouble with the way the two major elements (1. The darkness-of-the-human-soul introspective stuff, [...]

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