The latest #ShaxEpitaphs project update is available now. Did you know that, thanks to Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare now have memorials in the Stratford churchyard where they lie buried -- with, needless to say, Shakespearean epitaphs? shaxepitaphs.exeter.ac.uk/2026/02/03/j...

Sound on, hats off.

Associate Professorship in literature 1660–1830, at St Peter's College/English Faculty, University of Oxford, just advertised: www.spc.ox.ac.uk/about/vacanc... Tell all your favourite (long) c18thists!

Today is International Map Day! One of our favourite maps in the collections is this map of Exeter, engraved by Frans Hogenberg in c 1618. Can you identify any landmarks that still exist today? 📷 Constable Maps 27; digitised by @dhlabexeter.bsky.social #InternationalMapDay #MappingOurExeter

Hoping he does it. Will be Wilde.

THE SCRIVENER: Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross That cannot see this palpable device? Yet who so bold but says he sees it not? Heed the Scrivener #RichardIII 3.6 #ShakespeareSunday

If you're living somewhere outside the USA, one thing you can do is pressure your leaders to boycott World Cup and Olympic events here.

📢JOYCE YOUINGS LECTURE 2025-26 IS NEXT WEEK📢 Prof. Jane Whittle: Work & gender, status & power: the surprising history of everyday chores in early modern England 🗓️ 28 January, 3pm, followed by drinks reception 📍 Uni of Exeter & Zoom 🗃️ All welcome, register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-joyce-...

My contribution to the Colston statue debate is hot off the press, a mere five and a half years after the events of June 2020! journals.uio.no/acta/article...

Tragically, her words ‘appalled’ the rancorous, not their rancour. The stanza continues: ‘And suncke so deepe into their boyling brests, / That downe they let their cruell weapons fall, / And lowly did abase their loftie crests / To her faire presence, and discrete behests’. RIP.

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

The Canadian actor William Hutt (d. 2007) has a Shakespearean epitaph, and I must say it's one of my favourites: "When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer." Beautiful. #ShaxEpitaphs (1/3)

A #ShaxEpitaphs mystery.... Here I can just about make out 'not strain|d. It droppeth as the gentle rain | from Heaven.' But the first four(?) words look like something other than 'The quality of mercy'. Can anyone decipher this?? It's the memorial of Samuel Ball Green of Missouri (d. 1858).

The latest blog on the Shakespearean Graves website is up now! shaxepitaphs.exeter.ac.uk/2025/11/30/n... Would be genuinely fascinated to hear if anyone has further examples of Shakespearean headstone inscriptions from computer games 🪦👾

"I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like being asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be?" Thank you, Tom, for my first audition monologue, and much more.

Et, in Arcadia: We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it...

My co-authored chapter with Vicky Sparey on 'The Perils and Promises of Puberty' is soon to be published in Sarah Toulalan's book Early Modern Bodies. There are chapters by @amiebolissian.bsky.social , @davehitchcock.bsky.social & others. You can preorder here www.routledge.com/Early-Modern...

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of the fallen of WWI were buried with epitaphs drawn from Shakespearean. A selection can be found here: www.epitaphsofthegreatwar.com/tag/shakespe... None more haunting than the inscription for Alfred Dunne (aged 17) O MONSTROUS WORLD TO BE DIRECT AND HONEST IS NOT SAFE

No more noble British tradition than resigning over some nonsense everyone is only pretending to be angry about rather than all of the actually bad things you've done.

The website for the Shakespearean Graves project is now live -- check it out! shaxepitaphs.exeter.ac.uk #ShaxEpitaphs

I think our country sinks beneath the yoke. It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash Is added to her wounds. #Macbeth 4.3.49-51 #ShakespeareSunday

📢This Sunday in #Exeter! Historical reenactment based on historical research, in a former priory, converted to a domestic dwelling during the reformation. 'my perfect Sunday ... ' #EarlyModern 🗃️

Ah, it's Shakespeare's own infamous epitaph, 'Curst be he that moves my bones!' But no, this is Mary Caldwell (d. 1873), buried in Ipswich Massachusetts. The curse is surprisingly popular. And adding 'Shakespeare' at the bottom helps prove you're a literature lover, not some freak. #ShaxEpitaphs

What an incredible poet, what a loss

📢NEW MAILING LIST FOR CEMS!📢 Exeter's Centre for #EarlyModern Studies recently switched to a JiscMail list to allow people to join/unsubscribe more easily. FYI: we often host hybrid 🗃️ events. Interested? Instructions on how to join the mailing list are here: www.exeter.ac.uk/research/cen...

Exeter folk will be familiar with the equestrian statue of Sir Redvers Buller. There's no Shakespearean epitaph on the monument, but at its unveiling in 1905, a celebratory bamboo arch bore the inscription: "A soldier firm and sound of heart and of buxom valor" (Henry V, 3.6.25). (1/4)

I'm itching to share the 29(!) variations on 'after life's fitful fever he sleeps well' we've discovered so far as #ShaxEpitaphs, but don't want to try your patience. Just three: AFTER LIFE'S TROUBLED JOURNEY SHE SLEEPS WELL AFTER LIFE'S SCARLET FEVER I SLEEP WELL LIFE'S FITFUL PLAY IS O'ER

Hamlet: Alexander the Great is DIRT now www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... Three Hamlets, musing on the skull: Christopher Eccleston at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (2002); Alan Cumming at the Donmar (1993); Ben Kingsley, RSC (1975)

London authorities removed Banksy’s latest mural of a judge attacking a protester. What remains is a shadowy stain, eerily reminiscent of a hooded Grim Reaper wielding a scythe, capturing attention in its own right.

Shakespearean epitaphs don't always reek of Bardolatry. 'Friendly Ben' Dekle was ready to start (or continue) an argument with Shakespeare from beyond the grave. 'LIFE IS NOT A "TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT," BUT RATHER AN ADVENTURE WRITTEN BY THE FINGERS OF GOD.' #ShaxEpitaphs

I see what you did there, Wichita Searchlight for January 13, 1906. #ShaxEpitaphs

The Shakespearean Graves project is up and running! Our social media game is a work in progress, but here's a short thread of #ShaxEpitaphs to whet your interest.

This is the Washington Post (yes, that one): names in Arabic and English, and ages, of all 18,500 children killed in Gaza, plus portraits and stories where available: www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

Here’s one for early modernists: what is Norwich holding in this 1622 map (from Drayton’s ‘Poly-Olbion’)? Yes, Norwich had a big cathedral spire, but not two (and these maps usually indicate spires in the figure’s headdress). I’ve been tossing this about, and asking experts, for months. Stuck!

The Trump admin has formally unveiled a program to illegally use money Congress passed for sheltering migrants released from immigration custody to instead detain them in state-run prison camps. They are calling this — no joke — "shelter in a detention environment." www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Read this as 'futile endeavours'

The police (wrongly) inform a peaceful protestor that holding a Palestinian flag and signs deploring genocide is an offence under the Terrorism Act. This is the deranged policing environment the government has created.

Diolch to everyone who joined us in celebrating the launch of ‘Memory and Nation: Writing the History of Wales’ last Friday, a volume of essays published in honour of Professor Huw Pryce! The book is now available in your local bookshop! For more information, visit: 📚 uwp.co.uk/book/memory-...

Just received news that 27 people have been arrested in Parliament Square under the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding signs saying "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action". This is real police state behaviour.

"Well, I've never even heard the word 'shylock' before, so So go look it up. With your mouth closed.

Yes, it’s anti-Semitic. No, it’s not up for debate. No, he didn’t mean shyster. We’re good?

Job! Fixed-term, 1 year lecturer in Med/Ren Lit at UEA (covering the fellowship of @satyrane.bsky.social) ... it's a lovely, friendly School ... vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/16...

My book, "Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain" (or "True Britons and Celtic Empires", if you'd prefer) is now AVAILABLE FOR HARDBACK PREORDER Your library needs more about bardic antislavery, imperial complicity, and druids with telescopes, no? boydellandbrewer.com/978183765195...

Excellent letter from @mcraeandrew.bsky.social More on the #EnglishCreates campaign here: universityenglish.ac.uk/englishcreat... All resources free to use

Funded PhD studentship of €25,000/year for 4 years plus fees available @tcddublin.bsky.social to work with me on Irish women's life writing from the long 18th century! Please spread the word! @ecfjournal.bsky.social @cecs-york.bsky.social @clhlwr.bsky.social @oxfordlifewriting.bsky.social

Just got one of these and tried to listen. AI voice bot loved my article. The discussion of nostalgia in post-Reformation England reminded him/it of all the feels associated with his/its old high school sweater.

“Most of that grant money is appropriated by Congress for the National Institutes of Health to disburse to fund biomedical research after a lengthy application process by individual scientists, work that is not typically done at trade schools…” www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

FYI to media outlets, you're misleading your readers if you repeat this at face value. There's no lawful way for him to redirect these grants elsewhere. It's a lie to distract from how the GOP budget guts educational funding, including Pell Grants at trade schools.