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The author contends that the sonnets of William Shakespeare constitute an open source initiative in their availability for reinterpretation and commentary. The role of the craft workshop as a way to understand contemporary phenomena such as open-sourcing, crowd-sourcing, and cloud technologies and as a key driver for concepts around adaptation as a cultural force is examined. Ways in which acts of creativity become a means of registering cultural shifts and alterations in which Shakespeare has played a central role are outlined. The author also discusses how Shakespearian studies might respond to thinking about the power of the network.

The article discusses some of the contributions to Shakespeare studies released in 2010. The volume of Kathleen McLuskie on "Macbeth" for the Writers and their Work series is a cogent discussion of the play itself with its earlier chapters a close reading of both specific expressions of the play's structure. The latest contribution to the Shakespeare section of the Cambridge Companion series is on "Shakespeare's Last Plays." The monograph "Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare's Festive World," by Phebe Jensen looks to account for the post-Reformation Catholic recusant experience.

This article examines three musical interpretations of William Shakespeare's Falstaff plays that were composed and first performed in the early twentieth century in Great Britain. These include Edward Elgar's symphonic or tone poem "Falstaff," Gustav Holst's single-act chamber-opera "At the Boar's Head" and Vaughan Williams's opera "Sir John in Love." The article describes how the musical adaptations were shaped, and partly determined by, the literary-critical and intellectual accounts of the plays that were current at the time.