Shakespeare For All

Shakespeare wrote numerous plays and poems engaged with ancient Roman history. Shakespeare’s Renaissance culture had ancient Rome as its foundation stone. Roman language and literature were at the heart of English Renaissance education, and Rome was held up as a model for English civilization. But in Titus Andronicus, the earliest of his Roman works, Shakespeare crafts a bloody tale of violence an...

Shakespeare wrote numerous plays and poems engaged with ancient Roman history. Shakespeare’s Renaissance culture had ancient Rome as its foundation stone. Roman language and literature were at the heart of English Renaissance education, and Rome was held up as a model for English civilization. But in Titus Andronicus, the earliest of his Roman works, Shakespeare crafts a bloody tale of violence an...

Shakespeare wrote numerous plays and poems engaged with ancient Roman history. Shakespeare’s Renaissance culture had ancient Rome as its foundation stone. Roman language and literature were at the heart of English Renaissance education, and Rome was held up as a model for English civilization. But in Titus Andronicus, the earliest of his Roman works, Shakespeare crafts a bloody tale of violence an...

Part 3 starts with a discussion of general reading strategies to help you discover the poetic techniques and insights of any individual sonnet. It concludes with a close-reading of three sonnets from Professor Michael Schoenfeldt that show the extraordinary range of tone, emotion, and perspective in Shakespeare’s poems. Speeches and performers: Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s e...

Part 2 focuses closely on the two major “characters” to whom the sonnets are addressed: a beautiful young man, and a woman described as black. You’ll learn how the speaker represents his relationship to these figures and his desire for them, and what significance those relationships might have had in Shakespeare’s culture, as Professor Michael Schoenfeldt discusses sexual identity and race in earl...

The sonnet — a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, conventionally associated with love — was one of the most popular poetic forms in late Elizabethan England. In 1609, Shakespeare published a sequence of 154 sonnets that radically reimagined the question of what love can mean, including the question of who one might desire and what the experience of desire might be like. In the course, you’ll...

Part 3 features close-readings from Professor Laurie Maguire of some of the play’s key speeches: Caliban’s extraordinarily lyrical description of the island; Prospero’s beautiful and disturbing evocation of theatre, and perhaps the world, coming to an end; and Prospero’s renunciation of his magic. Speeches and performers: Caliban, 3.2, “Be not afeard …” (Kelly Hunter, MBE) Prospero, 4.1, “Be cheer...

With Professor Laurie Maguire, Part 2 explores the play’s many ambiguities — its uncertain geography, mental space, and genre — and how they reflect the play’s ethical ambiguities. Does Prospero contrast with or resemble the “foul witch” who was Caliban’s mother, or the brother who betrayed him for the sake of power? Is he a figure of spiritual regeneration or of colonization? We also look more cl...

The Tempest, one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, draws on themes and stories that fascinated him throughout his career while also taking his art form to unexpected new places. Set in the course of a single day on a magical island, the play focuses on a magician named Prospero who plots to punish the enemies who exiled him to the island 12 years ago — including his own brother. But will Prospe...

In Part 3, Professor Simon Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll hear the play’s dark energies emerge through Mercutio’s speech about “Queen Mab”; see how Juliet discovers a new, eroticized vision of the world and of herself as she awaits her wedding night, and witness one of the most iconic scenes in literature, when Juliet on her balcony imagines the...

With Professor Simon Palfrey, Part 2 looks closely at the play’s characters, and especially at the intelligence and swiftness of Juliet. You’ll see how the lovers apprehend new possibilities of human life, but also how their social world constrains their possibilities; and how the play might seem to offer the possibility of comedy, but how it’s destined for tragedy all along. And the tragedy doesn...

Children of families who are locked in a fatal feud, Romeo and Juliet risk community, identity, and life to pursue an all-consuming love. Today, Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous love stories in the world. But the play isn’t simply a celebration of love or an idealization of the lovers. This wild and dangerous play lays bare the link between desire and death, between love and loss. The tr...

In Part 3, Professor Emma Smith offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important scenes, which dramatize the wide range of relationships and types of love explored in the play. Speeches and performers: Orsino, 1.1, “If music be the food of love, play on …” (Jeffrey Blair Cornell) Malvolio and Olivia, 1.5, “I marvel your Ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal …” (Amanda Harris) An...

Part 2 looks at the many instances of inversion and transgression, looking at how characters cross boundaries of gender, status, and social role, and how they are punished or rewarded. Professor Emma Smith looks closely at the final scene and how it settles—or doesn’t— the characters’ roles and the play’s own status as a comedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Twelfth Night, named for the celebration that is both the culmination and the close of the Christmas festivities, is a bittersweet romantic comedy at once melancholy and merry. Through its central plot, in which the female Viola takes on the guise of the male Cesario and becomes beloved of both men and women, this play is also one of Shakespeare’s most modern approaches to identity and sexuality....

In Part 3, Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll get an in-depth look at the powerful relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, the climactic confrontation between Antonio and Shylock in the court, and the hard-edged poignancy of the play’s most famous speech: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Speeches and performers: Antonio, 1.1, “I pray y...

Part 2 discusses the play’s central characters, their profound bonds of intimacy and animosity, and the effect of money on those bonds. Professor Stephen Greenblatt explores the way that Shylock took hold of Shakespeare’s imagination and how Shakespeare transforms a stereotypically villainous figure into something much larger and more complex. You’ll also discover how Shylock’s fraught experience...

The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare’s most gripping and challenging plays. Labeled as a comedy in Shakespeare’s First Folio, today it resonates as tragedy as well, thanks to its most unforgettable character: the Jewish moneylender Shylock. Shylock experiences humiliation and oppression at the hands of the Venetian Christians, particularly the merchant Antonio. But when Antonio must borrow...

In Part 3, Professor Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll witness the king and the beggar in the heart of a storm; the naked man and the blind man on the edge of a cliff; and the father and daughter on the cusp between life and death; and you’ll learn how Shakespeare takes us into strange, impossible new places via the words and bodies of his actors....

Part 2 explores the way that Shakespeare revised the original Lear story and the way he revised his own play to create a uniquely wrenching form of tragedy. Professor Simon Palfrey also discusses the literary and generic traditions that inspired the play, showing how the central characters can be interpreted very differently depending on the literary lens through which we see them. Finally, we foc...

King Lear has perhaps the most expansive cosmic scope of any of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In this play, Shakespeare retells the story of an aging king from Britain’s ancient past who divides his kingdom among his daughters, only to have them turn against him. This story originally had a redemptive, tragi-comic ending; Shakespeare takes that story and changes it to create an almost scandalously shoc...

Part 3 features close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, with Professor Stephen Foley. Through Henry’s private soliloquy, we trace his moments of insight and blindness. In the Chorus’s inspiring invitation to the audience to recreate the Battle of Agincourt in their minds, and in Henry’s stirring speech to his own troops before the battle, we see how Shakespeare’s words shap...

Part 2 opens with a discussion of the history play genre and of how history shapes and constrains the plays’ protagonists. With Professor Stephen Foley, we then explore the complex character of Henry himself, asking why this figure has given rise to so many conflicting interpretations and how Henry’s unique political role should influence the way we judge him. Finally, we trace the arc of the play...

Henry V is one of the most celebrated of Shakespeare’s history plays. In the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a series of eight plays based on English chronicle history, telling the stories of civil wars and wars abroad, of the rise and fall of kings. Henry V was an English monarch who won great military victories in France in the early 1400s, and Shakespeare dramatizes his famous victory at Agincourt. In...

In Part 3, Professor Tiffany Stern offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches. You’ll discover the surprising biblical resonances in a speech by the foolish Bottom and see how the epilogue shifts the play from a story about magic to a magic spell placed on the audience itself. Speeches and Performers: Titania, 2.1, “Set your heart at rest: The Fairyland buys not the chil...