MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Revelatory work of literary detection
Research into the lost plays of the Shakespearean period provides new insights into the Bard and his work, says GORDON PARSONS
SHAKESPEARE'S STAGES: A panorama of London by Claes Van Visscher in 1616 shows two theatres — The Bear Garden and The Globe — in the foreground
[Wikipedia] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Shakespeare and Lost Plays
by David McInnis
(Cambridge University Press, £29.99)
DESPITE extensive research, relatively little is known about Shakespeare and his work and, consequently, popular scholarship tends to focus on the language and dramaturgy of the Bard’s extant plays.
Fortunately, compared with his contemporaries, many of his plays have survived through fellow actors posthumously collecting 36 of them in the famous First Folio.
Theatre historian David McInnis recognises that rather than being an isolated artist foreseeing his world reputation, this busy working dramatist, feeding the insatiable daily theatre appetite of Elizabethan and early Jacobean audiences, must essentially have responded to the currents of popularity and fashion, as important in the 16th and 17th centuries as they are today.
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GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by an unsubtle production of this comedy of upper middle class infidelity
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GORDON PARSONS recommends a gripping account of flawed justice in the case of Pinochet and the Nazi fugitive Walther Rauff
