Tina Packer On Shakespeare And The Bard's 400th Death Day

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• "Few people understand the work of William Shakespeare quite like Tina Packer. She’s the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, and one of the nation’s greatest interpreters of the Bard’s canon."

• "The death of most performed playwright in the world to be marked in Stratford-on-Avon, London and across the globe."

• "Just three columns to the left of the breathless page-one report on the assassination in that morning’s Boston Daily Advertiser blared an advertisement trumpeting Edwin Booth’s scheduled matinee performance as 'Hamlet' to conclude his successful three-week Boston engagement. The show, of course, would not go on."

• On 23 April 2014 — the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth — Shakespeare’s Globe embarked upon a two-year global tour of Hamlet to every country in the world. The ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’, directed by the Globe’s Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole, is a completely unprecedented theatrical adventure.

• "Lincoln was a lifelong Bardolater and serial Shakespeare-quoter, as Mr. Obama noted in remarks at the recent reopening of Ford’s Theater. Lincoln regarded Shakespeare, whose 445th birthday was last week, as many things: an oracle to be consulted for wisdom; a pastor with whom to share confidences and from whom to seek comfort, a friend. He kept a 'Complete Works' close at hand in the White House."