David Tennant To Contribute To 24 Hour Shakespeare



David Tennant is one of the contributors to 24 Hour Shakespeare - a celebration of the Bard which will take place on Monday 20th June - the longest day of Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary year and the summer solstice.

24 Hour Shakespeare will see Shakespeare Lives, a six-month online festival, co-curated by the BBC and the British Council to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of the Bard, go round the clock and round the globe using the time references in Shakespeare’s plays and Sonnets.

Every hour will be marked on social media by posts that fit the specific time of day. There’ll be great film and video clips with famous performers past and present, rare stills, a range of specially created GIFs and a wealth of wonderful Shakespearean material – surprising, fascinating and fun to share.

Why do it? Well, as Germaine Greer has pointed out, clocks came into common usage in Shakespeare’s lifetime and he’s the first playwright to include frequent references to clock time in his work. Indeed, the phrase ‘watch the clock’ first appears in Sonnet 57. His work is also full of the most wonderful poetic and insightful references to time itself and its relationship to our mortal span.

Featured artists include:
Antony Andrews, Ashley Walters, Bob Hoskins, Colin Blakely,Colin Morgan, David Tennant, Dame Diana Rigg, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Ian McKellen, Imogen Stubbs, James Hazeldine, Jamie Parker
John Hudson, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Marsha Hunt, Sir Michael Gambon, Paul Daneman, Phil Daniels, Richard Griffiths, Richard Pasco, Roger Allam, Roger Daltrey, Rudolph Nureyev, Simon Callow, Simon Russell Beale, Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Patrick Stewart, Tom Hiddleston, Warren Mitchell and Sir Willard White.

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