Images of International Fleet Review and Mock Battle

Here's a link to the BBC's website with several images of the 28 June festivities in Portsmouth and the Solent.

And a link to BBC's report on the mock battle and Queen Elizabeth's review of the international fleet. Here you can also watch a video of the Battle of Trafalgar "re-enactment."

Trafalgar Festival Begins

Maritime London students will be interested in a segment that aired on NPR's Morning Edition today. The report covers the International Fleet Review held off Portsmouth on 28 June to commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar and initiate ongoing festivities. NPR's coverage is refreshingly ironic about Britain's nostalgia for its glory days of naval dominion. One of the issues we will discuss over the term is the legacy of English imperialism and the politics of reenactments and commemorations of this nature, some of which we will witness this fall.

Link to NPR's Morning Edition coverage of the International Fleet Review (audio report)

Pericles at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

This is the final season of artistic director Mark Rylance's leadership of the repertory of the rebuilt Globe theater, and we will have the pleasure of taking in Pericles, Prince of Tyre as groundlings there. A splashy, very physical, and controversial production of a controversial play, the show, with its incessant voyaging and numerous shipwrecks in the Eastern Mediterranean, will provide rich material for both the Shakespeare and the Maritime London classes. The production mixes poetry and cirque du soleil-like acrobatics in a memorable, often hilarious version of one of Shakespeare's more ripe and puzzling tragi-comedies--a story that announces itself, in the figure of the Medieval poet Gower who returns from the grave to tell it, as both old and restorative.

We hope that actor Corin Redgrave, who starred as a very moving Pericles, will recover fully from his recent heart attack and be able to rejoin the cast.

CurtainUp London review