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The Heckler

The Heckler: the Shakespeare anniversary has stripped the Bard of his beauty

Shakespeare400 has made the playwright into a brand, an icon to be name-checked but rarely grappled with

23 April 2016

9:00 AM

23 April 2016

9:00 AM

The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death has reached its peak. Recently we’ve had Shakespeare’s complete works performed through the puppetry of kitchenware. On books pages, you can read about everything from Edward Wilson-Lee’s Shakespeare in Swahililand (surprisingly beguiling) to Simon Andrew Stirling’s Shakespeare’s Bastard: A Life of Sir William Davenant (he wasn’t).

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