Richard II
It seemed like the end of days: the eerie wasteland of 14th-century Europe
The Black Death combined with the Hundred Years’ War left the Continent a desolate world, full of terror and foreboding
Shakespeare as cruise-ship entertainment: Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing reviewed
Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II is a high-calibre version of a fascinating story. A king reluctantly yields his crown to a…
The mystique of Henry V remains as powerful as ever
The belligerent young hero of Agincourt really was the model of a medieval monarch, doing the job exactly as it was supposed to be done, according to Dan Jones
He never looked back again
In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes…
Pox-ridden and power-crazed
Poor old Henry IV: labelled (probably unfairly) as a leper, but accurately as a usurper, he has been one of…
Who was then the gentleman?
Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’…
Family matters
God, what a title. The Gathered Leaves. It sounds like a tremulous weepie about grief and endurance with a closing…
1386 and all that
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
Recent crime fiction
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than…
The night I fell back in love with Shakespeare
‘Dad, it’s three hours long,’ says Boy, worriedly. ‘Yeah. And whose bloody fault is it we’re going?’ I want to…
Kissing away kingship
Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending…
