An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art displays the extravagant Tudor taste for jewels, artworks, tapestries, and other finery.

Reviewed:

The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 10, 2022 – January 8, 2023; the Cleveland Museum of Art, February 26 – May 14, 2023; and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, June 24 – September 24, 2023

Shakespeare repeatedly grappled with a question that haunted him but that could not be openly discussed with reference to any of the key figures in contemporary English affairs: why do communities of free men and women, people who have every reason to look out for their own interests, succumb to those who have no regard for the common good? Master of the oblique angle, the playwright prudently projected his imagination away from his immediate circumstances and explored in ancient Rome or pre-Christian Sicily or medieval England the territory he could not safely enter in his own world.

At the Metropolitan Opera, Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s adaptation of ​“Hamlet” nods to different, surprising versions of Shakespeare’s text.

In ​“The Book of All Books,” the great Italian polymath offers his interpretation of biblical stories.