Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock, the fourteenth reading in the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, is coming September 14th to the Gremlin Theater. The American Shakespeare Repertory is proud to announce the cast: Neal Beckman – Richard II Tim Perfect – Thomas of Woodstock Kelly Bancroft – Queen Anne Ann Frances Gregg – Duchess of [...]

Hamilton may be clearly wrong in identifying the Second Maiden’s Tragedy as the lost Cardenio, but there remains an important and lingering question: If the handwriting in the Second Maiden’s Tragedy manuscript does belong to William Shakespeare, what does that mean? Well, it could mean that this is, in fact, a lost play by Shakespeare. [...]

THE MISSING FLETCHER Because the 1653 entry in the Stationer’s Register assigns The History of Cardenio to both Fletcher and Shakespeare, Hamilton is forced to acknowledge Fletcher’s involvement in the play. But one rather gets the feeling that he’d rather not be bothered by it. For example, the entire foundation of his argument rests on [...]

This is the primary plot of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: At the beginning of the play, the Tyrant has overthrown the rightful king Govianus in an effort to win the love of Govianus’ wife (the Lady). When the Lady rejects him in favor of Govianus despite his victory, the Tyrant is enraged and chooses to [...]

Our knowledge of Cardenio, presumably based on the character of the same name in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, comes from three historical accounts: (1) The Revels Accounts record two performances of the play at King James’ Court in 1613 (as transcribed by Hamilton, emphasis added): Itm paid to the said John Heminges vppon the lyke warrt: [...]

In 1994, Charles Hamilton published Cardenio, or the Second Maiden’s Tragedy. Using his expertise as a handwriting analyst, Hamilton first concluded that William Shakespeare had written his own will (by comparing it to his signatures). Hamilton then used the handwriting on the will to conclude that Shakespeare had written the manuscript for The Second Maiden’s [...]

A fellow by the name of John Warburton was once a huge fan of Elizabethan theater. He spent a great deal of time collecting original manuscripts of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. By the time he was done, he had most likely accumulated the largest and most impressive such collection in the known world. One day, [...]

Now that all of the content from our old website has been successfully ported over, we’re very happy to announce that our new website has officially launched. While there’s still some formatting to be tweaked (notably links are currently being displayed in the same color as normal text, which we’re hoping to have debugged ASAP), [...]

The American Shakespeare Repertory website is currently being converted to a WordPress installation. We’ll be right back with a new and improved site. EDIT: The core functionality of the site has been implemented. New RSS Feed is active. Archival news posts have been migrated. We still have some formatting to tweak and some back-end content [...]