One for the bibliophiles out there This painting was flagged up in a book I am reading atm (Portable Magic @oldfortunatus.bsky.social ) and whilst I'm pretty sure I have seen it before it hadn't really lodged in my memory I give you Giuseppe Arcimboldo's c 1566 painting, The Librarian

I probably shouldn't tell anyone this but apparently it's Fountain Pen Day on Friday and Cult Pens has 10% off all week to celebrate: cultpens.com/collections/...

Major in Africana Studies or any humanities course like English Literature! You could be mayor of New York City. You could do anything.

Paddleboarding witch, 1643. Featured in Jon Crabb's essay "Woodcuts and Witches" about the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone so familiar today publicdomainreview.org/essay/w...

The ’king’ & ‘queen’ travelled along the Thames on golden leopards, and ’Indian pages’ carried ingots of silver and gold. This spectacle exhibited stereotypes about the Americas, but also, perhaps, a knowledge of the longstanding metalworking traditions of peoples including the Incas and Muiscas.

On this day in 1611 — days before the first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Tempest — the inauguration of a new Lord Mayor of London involved an elaborate pageant featuring English subjects dressed up as Indigenous Americans ‘from the rich and Golden Indian mines’. #goldenworld

Image: Program for The Tempest, Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration, New York, 1916. The cover shows Caliban. Program Collection, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. 4/

I saw one of the final previews @the-rsc.bsky.social at the weekend & concur; it made terrifying sense as a world, I LOVED what it did with the priest, the SPACE, & Lia Williams is astonishing. Whole run sold out, can we have a transfer as a little treat? www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/o...

Our OWC/English Faculty #Shakespeare webinar series continues! Next up, Henry VIII on 3 Nov at 6pm. Join @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and @laurajaynewright.bsky.social to explore the play & how we might approach it differently in the twenty-first century. All welcome! FREE but registration required

"Parking is such sweet sorrow"

I don't like linking to wretched Am*z*n but a sample of my book has just appeared (most of the introduction, it looks like, and the plates!) and, well, I hope you like it. Proper publication next month. EEEEEK. www.amazon.co.uk/Textile-Shak...

How long can the C of E continue its privileges as the established church? www.reuters.com/world/uk/chu...

a tiny bit of good news is that we have secured funding to digitize john milton's copy of holinshed's CHRONICLES (1587). the images will form part of MILTON'S LIBRARY, an open-access site featuring the 10 books positively identified as milton's w/ transcriptions/translations of his marginal notes.

Do join me and @callanid.bsky.social to talk buck baskets, feisty wives and small town Tudor life👇

Really enjoyed talking to Philippa Gregory about Cromwell, Tudor slang, historical fiction and tyranny for the new podcast

Will is one of the best people I know to talk to about poetry: £20 for 2 hours of his time is a bargain

'This glamorous Life writing began early. Weeks before Marlowe’s untimely and violent death, a shady intelligencer called Richard Baines had drafted the outline of the playwright’s afterlife' Emma Smith: Our ideas of Christopher Marlowe

At @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk on Tuesday: Fiona Stafford speaks to Jenny Uglow about her new book, A Year with Gilbert White, which chronicles the work of the Hampshire clergyman who became the father of British natural history. Just a few tickets are left: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jenny-uglo...

Here's a film of his long, searing 1980s poem V. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu3Z...

Our #Shakespeare webinar series continues! Join us on 6 Oct at 6pm to delve into the new OWC edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor with @oldfortunatus.bsky.social & @callanjd.bsky.social All welcome! Register now via Eventbrite & you will be sent a Zoom link before the event. #teamenglish

Look who has a gorgeous cover now!! Arden of Faversham introduced by moi will be published as part of the Oxford World’s Classics series in April 2026. Look at that cover! ❤️❤️🔥 Publication date is 9 April 2026. You can pre-order your copy here: global.oup.com/ukhe/product...

'And that underlying rhythm probably sounds quite familiar: it’s like a heartbeat. Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter because it sounds very close to natural, heart-felt speech': argh, this kind of thing (from Shakespeare's Globe website) drives me mad: someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/10-reasons...

Last of a recent brilliant bundle of Puffin Post magazines. Part of my pleasure in collecting them is sharing them here & seeing others enjoy them too. Another glorious Jill McDonald illustration & a bright reminder that spring light always returns, as autumn dampens the air & lengthens the shadows

Aussies, Kiwis, and people of the Southeastern Hemisphere: I’m teaching ✨Pop Bibliography✨ at the Australian & New Zealand Rare Book School in Feb. 2026!! Applications are now open: www.sl.nsw.gov.au/preview-link...

Did you miss our recent #Shakespeare webinar on The Comedy of Errors? Watch the recording to catch up. And don't forget to register for the next webinar on 6 Oct where Emma Smith will be exploring The Merry Wives of Windsor with Callan Davies. All welcome! youtu.be/l5OTG2OL2Hc

On Tuesday, @tricialockwood.bsky.social will be at Conway Hall talking to Joe Dunthorne about her upcoming novel, 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘉𝘦 𝘈𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘠𝘰𝘶, in her only UK event for the book. Tickets here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/patricia-l...

Very pleased to see our Bee-ing Human film on the @leverhulme.ac.uk website. I will be sharing more from our science-humanities project on bee sentience soon as we finalise our bee book this autumn media.leverhulme.ac.uk/video/charle...

(The shoes - which are in @maacambridge.bsky.social - feature in chapter 3 of TEXTILE SHAKESPEARE, 'Leather/Wool', as not-Marlowe's, alongside a pair of not-Shakespeare's gloves. And SO MUCH MORE. Scheduled for publication two months today!) (yes I know that leather isn't a textile...)

Thoughts on LEATHER www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... Hamlet (Paapa Essiedu) & Gravedigger (Ewart James Walters) @the-rsc.bsky.social 2016 & some C16 shoes, found @corpuscambridge.bsky.social. (Not Marlowe's. His father was a shoemaker, Shakespeare's a glover, printer Richard Field's a tanner.)

Publication day today 11 September 2025 www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ros-...

It's #WorldSuicidePreventionDay; it was really important to me when I wrote a new introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet that I included a page of 'Advice and Support', which I hope might be useful for students, teachers, actors, readers... Here it is

Keep hearing some buzzing about performing Marlowe more... obviously we're doing Doctor Faustus twice in October so... you know... do the thing. If you want to. It's not like you're signing your life away. In blood. www.ticketsource.co.uk/beyondshakes...

My book is out in paperback TODAY. All about children’s books, which are the best and most important sort. bit.ly/4pdXMNt

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.

Brilliant book. 👇

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... - who would have predicted the Guardian to have a view on Christopher Marlowe?

‘An England that stayed asleep, wandering in a dream and forgetting what decency is and why it matters, is the world inherited by Winston Smith.’ Thorougly enjoyed this fine book by Nathan Waddell on #GeorgeOrwell and the everyday, quotidian ordinariness that fill all our lives and bring such joys.

A dandy roll, used in the 19th-century to press wire-made watermarks -- like those found on handmade, laid papers -- into machine-made paper. Skeuomorphic technology?

We're going up against Sun, Sea and Selling Houses on Channel 4 this Monday at 6pm, but @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and I have Shakespeare in our [online] corner (and - spoiler alert - The Comedy of Errors features both sea *and* houses). Do come and join us if you're free!

I have this trick when I get edited: I make a copy of the file, and then—without looking—I hit "accept all." Then I read it. I just read the thing I wrote, with "yes!" to all edits. Then I go back to the other file and look at the edits one-by-one. It's game-changing to see it without the red.

This will be really good, and I hardly ever think that about academic books.

Born With Teeth - worth it if only for the line “Beaumont and Fletcher get away with it” @the-rsc.bsky.social

Ophelia, DROWNED www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo... Of *course* Milton liked this bit. Millais is probably compulsory here (modelled by Elizabeth Siddal 1851-2; she posed for 4 months in a bath heated with lamps underneath & caught a bad cold. I do find the Pre Raphs INTENSELY ANNOYING.)

I'm moving over from the X box. Meanwhile my edition of #Marlowe's Edward II @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social is available for pre-order. With ample critical, performance, & textual intro, annotations, plus 22 illus of C20-21 performance, early texts & readers. www.bloomsbury.com/us/edward-ii...

Join us online on 1 September at 6pm to explore #Shakespeare's 'The Comedy of Errors' with Emma Smith @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and Ian Burrows @irburrows.bsky.social. This webinar is free and open to all. Prepare to learn more about one of Shakespeare's most farcical plays! #TheComedyofErrors

Here’s my bottom line on the firehose of AI higher ed discourse: for the vast majority for us it’s over. “It” here is not “college” or “teaching”’per se; rather, “it” is the transactional underpinning of those endeavors. Let me explain: 🧵

Hanging out at a park overlooking the beach on a beautiful day with coffee, Shakespeare, and Professor Emma @oldfortunatus.bsky.social

Coming soon: a collaborative article on Ruth Negga’s Broadway Shakespeare, co-written w/the amazing Justine Nakase. Thanks to our cluster editors @norajw.bsky.social & @louisegeddes.bsky.social (& @drpetekirwan.bsky.social and everyone at @shaxbull.bsky.social) for shepherding this to publication.

Congrats to all those awarded visiting Bodleian Library fellowships for 25-26, especially the Ann Bodley Fellowship in Women's History #bodleian #WGQ www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/fellowsh...