Sheldrake decides to put his money where his mouth is regarding Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Why should we care about Marlowe, both on his own terms and in relation to Shakespeare?
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1590s
Julius Caesar and the Soliloquy
The soliloquy is one of Shakespeare’s most recognisable and distinctive theatrical devices. It is in no small part responsible for his fame as a dramatist of human psychology. Was Julius Caesar the gateway in Shakespeare’s soliloquising art between the 1590s and the 1600s? Sheldrake takes a close look at a few speeches from the play.
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Short SoS – Play Dates
How do we know when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays? Well, there are several methods of dating a play. Sheldrake rattles through them, taking in a couple of 1590s Michael Billingtons along the way.
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Short SoS – The Drama of the Sonnets
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are things you nearly always read alone. But there is a rich seam of drama and conversation to be mined from them, as Sheldrake found recently when he saw them read aloud at the Royal Festival Hall.
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Short SoS – Venus and Adonis
The poetry of Shakespeare tends to be an “also-ran” in his canon, but Venus and Adonis tells us as much about his development and abilities as any of the plays.
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Sheldrake on Shakespeare 