Happy Birthday Will, with Chinese Whispers

Type the name of Shakespeare into the Google News search facility on his 443rd birthday and you get 4,549 hits. Type in "Christopher Marlowe" and you get 31. Such is the "winner takes all" world created by globalisation and commodification. The process involves a Chinese whisper effect, leading to the magnification of error. Unusually, I find myself praising the Daily Mail, whose Saturday story on the 1599 epilogue was absolutely accurate. But within hours, it was being misreported by ABC News Australia that Shakespeare was "resident playwright at Richmond Palace" - an eliding of "in house playwright for the Chamberlain's Men, who on this occasion played to the court at a time when the Queen happened to be at Richmond Palace as opposed to Whitehall or Greenwich".

Selections from weekend coverage: "Is there a lost Shakespeare in your attic?" (Telegraph article by JB on attribution and the fringes of the canon), Times review by Fiona Shaw (great to have an actor's take on oour work), Observer review, interview in Independent on Sunday (apologies to Heloise Senechal who, in the hubbub of a vegetarian restaurant in Marylebone, was misheard by the journalist as Eloise Summershaw).