Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.

There’s always the risk, when you put a tape machine in front of Michael Gambon (b. 1940), that it won’t be recording the truth and nothing but. His taste for mischief-making is legendary, his low boredom threshold a matter of fact. It doesn’t take a shrink to come up with an explanation. Film parts may take come thick and fast these days, not least in the interminable Harry Potter franchise, but Gambon loves a live audience.

Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is...

A genuine, if unanticipated, phenomenon has emerged over time at Shakespeare's Globe, the Bardic-themed playhouse that these days is full more often than not and with good reason, too. Time was when the canon's lesser-known offerings could be counted on to play to not much more than a devoted few. Well, no more.

The premise of Jonathan Bate’s one-man play, directed by Tom Cairns, is simple but surprisingly effective: a trawl through the seven ages of Shakespeare, from babe to box, told through a mixture of biographical narrative illuminated by relevant scenes from Will’s work.

Shakespeare – The Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall ****

“It isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a surprise to him that it isn’t a surprise to me.” On a Monday morning in the rehearsal room at Shakespeare’s Globe, actors and actresses are getting into character. “You’re acting panic,” clarifies the director, “and when you hear his voice it’s real panic.” Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century?

Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts?

Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV cycle locks together the first modern plays in English. They strive for something quite new in drama, retaining a structural boldness and complexity seldom encountered in contemporary theatre. That's how "modern" they are (or seem). And in reiterating what others must have said oft and better, I intend no abutment on that deadly phrase “early modern” into which historians, and most annoyingly many literary critics, now incorporate the word “Renaissance” - which Henry IV of course also magnificently is.

The second season of the Bridge Project - a transatlantic relationship forged between between Kevin Spacey, artistic director at the Old Vic in London, theatre and film director Sam Mendes, and Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music - which aims to make theatrical connections in a series of cross-cast co-productions with American and British actors, has opened with a double header of Shakespeare. At first sight, As You Like It and The Tempest may not appear obvious bedfellows but, as Mendes (who directs both plays) points out in his programmes notes, they both feature a bloody sibling rivalry and a touching father-daughter relationship, and he subtly underlines those parallels.