Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

After a four-year renovation, the Folger Shakespeare Library is now open with 12,000 square feet of new public spaces. But behind the scenes, in our original building, we've also revamped the way we serve researchers working with the world's largest Shakespeare collection. On this episode, host Barbara Bogaev talks with Director of Collections Greg Prickman, Folger Institute Director Patricia Akhi...

On June 21, the Folger reopens after a four-year renovation. The reimagined Folger has brand-new public exhibition spaces where we can introduce visitors to Shakespeare and his plays, as well as showcase some of the treasures of the Folger's collection. Behind the scenes in the original building, we've also completely revamped the way we serve researchers visiting the world's largest Shakespeare c...

Fred Wilson's artistic output includes painting, sculpture, photography, and collage, among other media. But his 1992 work "Mining the Museum" at the Maryland Historical Society used the museum's own collection as its material, radically reframing how American institutions present their art. Wilson went on to represent the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. For that exhibition, Wilson comm...

The desire for a second chance provides the engine for many of Shakespeare's plays. In their new book,  Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud,  Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and psychologist Adam Phillips argue that this fascination with the second chance links Shakespeare with one of his biggest 20th century fans: Sigmund Freud. Shakespeare helped Freud think about second chances—why we...

When Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was on Broadway in 2002, it won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel awards for best play. Zimmerman took home the Tony award for best director. This spring, director Psalmayene 24 and an all-Black cast stage a new production of the play interpreted through the lens of the African diaspora. Zimmerman j...

In her new book,  Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent,  Dame Judi Dench and actor/director Brendan O'Hea chat about   her long history with the Bard. On this episode, Dench and O'Hea join host Barbara Bogaev to talk about Dench's experiences playing Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Titania. Plus, parrots, Polonius, dirty words, hijinks with Sir Ian McKellen, why it's easier to laugh while wo...

Land enclosure. Wildlife management. Erosion. Pollution. Mining practices. Today, we'd call these environmental issues. But, hundreds of years before the modern environmental movement coalesced, these issues also appeared in Shakespeare's plays. We talk to Todd Andrew Borlik, a professor at the University of Huddersfield and author of Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, Drama and Ecopolitics in Ja...

In A Room of One's Own , Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents "Judith" Shakespeare, and concludes that this female genius would have been doomed. But that's not the end of the story. If Woolf had read Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer (nee Bassano), Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Cary, she might have thought...

In her new memoir,  Green World , Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim tells the story of how she came to Shakespeare relatively late in her education. Although she didn't grow up with Shakespeare, Ephraim became transfixed by  The Merchant of Venice  as a grad student. In particular, she found herself drawn to Jessica, Shylock's daughter, and the mysteries of their relationship. That curiosity le...

Eddie Izzard has a long record of dramatic roles. She has starred in two plays by David Mamet, and earned a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in the play  A Day in the Death of Joe Egg . She had a recurring role in  Ocean's Twelve  and  Thirteen , and even played the title character in Christopher Marlowe's  Edward II . But it's her decades of experience as a stand-up comedian that prepared I...

Maybe there really  was  something rotten in Denmark. On this episode, we talk with Bradley J. Irish about disgust in Shakespeare. In his new book, Irish identifies the emotion, which combines physical revulsion and moral outrage, as one of the central thematic emotions in Shakespeare's plays. In his close readings across the canon, Irish finds disgust everywhere: in Caius Martius Coriolanus's dis...

When the Folger reopens on June 21 and you come to take a walk in our new west entrance garden, look down. There, you'll see a new poem, written for the Folger by former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Dove joins us on the podcast to read that poem aloud for the first time. Plus, she reflects on how writing for marble is different from writing for the page, and remembers the moment she discovered Shak...

Even after appearing in a Shakespeare play, historical romance novels, a Broadway musical, and prestige TV dramas, there's still more to learn about Anne Boleyn. A new biography by the team of husband-and-wife historians John Guy and Julia Fox takes a scholarly look at the evidence surrounding Anne's rise and fall. They freshly examine well-known accounts, and also take in passing references in ne...

Shakespeare has the perfect lines for riding into battle or stumbling around a stormy heath. But does he have the right stuff to take us on a daily commute or a trip to the grocery store? On this episode, David and Ben Crystal join us to talk about their new book, Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life , which offers daily Shakespeare quotes you can apply to your everyday existence. The Crystals—Dav...

The most unforgivable crime in Richard III has to be when the king orders the murder of his two young nephews, Edward and Richard. But what if Richard III was framed? Philippa Langley is the amateur historian whose commitment to righting a historical wrong led to the discovery of Richard III's remains a decade ago. Langley wasn't a scholar—she was a screenwriter and a member of the Richard III Soc...

What comes to mind when you think about a "court jester?"  What if we told you that fools in the Tudor court didn't look or sound anything like the zany clowns you have in mind? Historians don't know much about Will Somer. We know he was Henry VIII's court fool, but the details of his biography—and, crucially, his comedy—were never recorded. By Shakespeare's time, Somer had become famous. Whenever...

Isabelle Schuler's debut novel  Queen Hereafter  attempts to fill in a backstory for Lady Macbeth. The book takes place in 11th century Scotland, where a king's reign tended to be short and brutal. For her version of Lady M, Schuler didn't rely on Shakespeare or his source material, Holinshed's Chronicles. Instead, she looked to the annals and sagas that predate Holinshed. There, Schuler found Gru...

The First Folio—the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays—hit bookstores 400 years ago this November. Emma Smith of Oxford University tells us just what this famous book has been up to for the past four centuries. We explore notable collectors like Sir Edward Dering and our founders, Emily and Henry Folger; how the 18 th -century slave trade supercharged the book's value; how the 235 exta...

We talk with Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber about how modernist writers of London's Bloomsbury Group made Shakespeare their own. Garber's most recent book—her twentieth—is  Shakespeare in Bloomsbury . In it, she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, that circle of early 20th-century intellectuals included novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, painter V...

Sir Patrick Stewart joins us on the podcast to talk about how Shakespeare has shaped his life. Stewart tells host Barbara Bogaev about his Yorkshire youth, his audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Starfleet Captain Jen-Luc Picard. Stewart's memoir,  Making It So , is available now from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. From the Folger's  Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. P...

Sometimes, the beauty of Shakespeare's poetry takes your breath away. In the case of today's guest, Shakespeare gave him his breath  back . You may recognize actor Michael Patrick Thornton from his roles on TV series like  Private Practice  and  The Good Doctor . Twenty years ago, Thornton had just started out in his acting career when he suffered two spinal strokes that nearly ended his life. He...

Author Katherine Rundell talks about the extraordinary life—or should we say  lives?— of John Donne, who wrote some of the 17th century's most complex and intellectually dazzling poetry. Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and the author of  Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne  takes us through Donne's evolution from hotshot poet to penniless prisoner to rock star preacher...

Today, we sail the seven seas with Shakespeare. In addition to being a dedicated swimmer, Steve Mentz is a professor at St. John's University. His books, including 2009's  At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean,  connect literary criticism with marine ecology. Mentz talks with Barbara Bogaev about Shakespeare's oceanic metaphors, how much Shakespeare really knew about the ocean, and what plays like ...

Can you love Shakespeare and be an antiracist? Farah Karim-Cooper's new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in Shakespeare's plays. Karim-Cooper also looks at the ways Shakespeare's work became integral to Britain's imperial project, and its sense of cultural superiority. But for all this, Karim-Cooper is an unapologetic Shakespeare fan. It's right there in the...

A Palestinian production of  Hamlet  in the West Bank is the backdrop for Isabella Hammad's new novel,  Enter Ghost . Hammad's first novel, the beautiful and sprawling  The Parisian,  won international acclaim in 2019, and earlier this year,  Granta  included Hammad in its decennial "Best of Young British Novelists" list. The narrator of Hammad's new novel is Sonia, a British Palestinian actress w...