Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

This episode shifts slightly from our usual intense focus on Shakespeare. Instead, we are talking about the world that he inhabited, or at least a small part of that world: the kitchen. Kitchens, and what goes on in them, come up in Shakespeare’s plays with surprising frequency, whether directly or, more often, obliquely. Our guest is Wendy Wall, an English professor at Northwestern University and...

In the decades after Shakespeare's death, his works temporarily fell out of favor. His renaissance is usually credited to actor-manager David Garrick, who staged a Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Riding Garrick's coattails, an artistic entrepreneur named John Boydell later opened one of England's first art galleries, devoted to paintings of scenes from Shakespeare plays. The Boydell Shakespeare Galle...

In 2012, Andrew Dickson watched a Shakespeare play in London that set him off on a quest. When it ended, he had traveled to Poland, Germany, India, China and all across the United States. He chronicled his travels in a book titled "Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe" that was published in 2015. He explains now what the play was that set him off on this journey, and just what it...

This podcast episode, which deals with race, Othello, and how the Elizabethans portrayed blackness onstage, offers a startling, new interpretation of Desdemona’s handkerchief that is changing the way scholars understand the play. Our guests are Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English at George Washington University and a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and Ian Smith, Professor of...

The period when Shakespeare was writing was one torn by disagreements over the proper method of observing Christianity in England. Protestantism was at war with Catholicism and the Church of England often employed coercion and even violence to enforce its hegemony. The way Shakespeare handled these divisions is the topic of this podcast episode, "There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Than Are...

When the British came to colonize the African continent in the middle of the 1800s, they brought Shakespeare with them. But after the British left power, it was often Shakespeare who leaders in African countries summoned to push back against the colonial experience — using his words to promote unity, elevate native languages, and critique the politics of the time. Barbara Bogaev interviews Jane Pl...

We likely wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays without the First Folio of 1623. Imagine a world without "Macbeth," "Twelfth Night," or "Julius Caesar." Our guest on this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited is Emma Smith, a professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford and the author of “The Making of the First Folio.” In her book, she offers an intimate, step-by-step examination of how the First Fo...

Imagine a comic book series in which Shakespeare’s most popular characters team up in rival, warring camps bent on seizing control of the kingdom that is the world of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s called “Kill Shakespeare,” and Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col have been publishing the series since 2010. Barbara Bogaev interviewed the authors while they were at Comic-Con in New York in 2015 for the r...

Discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester, England, an ancient manuscript proves to be the long-lost first play by none other than the young William Shakespeare from Stratford. That’s the premise of the latest work from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged),” which premieres at Folger Theatre in April 2016. The comedy troupe’s curren...

The Folger is the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, and the crown jewels of that collection are the 82 First Folios. To celebrate 400 years of Shakespeare, eighteen of these rare books are traveling the country throughout 2016 in the “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” exhibition. But before they hit the road, each First Folio received a little TLC from Folger conservators up on...

In Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST, the magician Prospero conjures up a storm, charms his daughter to sleep, and uses his power to control Ariel and other spirits. Is this magic for real, or is Prospero pulling off elaborate illusions? Fascinated by this question and by Prospero’s relinquishing of magic at the play’s end, Teller (of the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller) co-directed a production of THE TE...

Shakespeare, of course, is not just performed in English, and his work is not just acted on stage. Foreign-language adaptations of Shakespeare on film have a tradition that goes back as long as talking pictures have existed. For the past 20 years, these films have been the career focus of Mark Thornton Burnett, our guest on this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited. Mark Thornton Burnett is a professo...

There’s something that never ceases to astound when it comes to Shakespeare – the way this 400-year-old playwright continues to pop up in popular culture. Our guest on this podcast episode is Erik Didriksen, who takes hit songs from artists like Taylor Swift and Coldplay and rewrites them as Elizabethan-style sonnets. The Tumblr where Didriksen has posted these sonnets has become so popular that h...

What impact has Shakespeare’s writing had on Indian theater? And, how has Indian theater shaped and altered Shakespeare’s work? Shakespeare’s interaction with India came, of course, in the context of India’s experience with British colonization and colonialism. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I gave a charter to the East India Company to trade with the Shahs, emperors and Maratha princes who’d ruled the...

Laura Wayth, our guest for this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited, is Assistant Professor of Theatre at San Francisco State University and the author of a “how-to” book called "The Shakespeare Audition: How to Get Over Your Fear, Find the Right Piece, and Have a Great Audition." Wayth was interviewed by Neva Grant, and she was joined by actors Stephanie Ann Foster, Mike Ryan, and Bruce Avery. From...

There’s no doubt you’ve seen images of Shakespeare – maybe in a book, a museum or an ad on the wall of a bus stop. So it’s safe to say: You imagine that you have a pretty good idea of what Shakespeare looked like. Oxford University professor Katherine Duncan-Jones has written a book that invites you to question your assumptions and – maybe – take a new look. As you’ll hear, there really are only a...

Shakespeare adaptations are a proud tradition. Prokofiev turned ROMEO AND JULIET into a ballet. Verdi turned MACBETH and OTHELLO into operas, and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW and TWELFTH NIGHT have been converted by Hollywood into teen comedies. But there’s a different type of Shakespeare adaptation that’s a lot harder to get right – that’s when someone takes an existing piece of popular entertainment...

Henry Clay Folger paid a world record price for a book—not once, but twice—as he became the world's leading collector of Shakespeare First Folios. In this episode, economist and author Andrea Mays talks with Neva Grant about some of the fascinating financial and personal details of Folger's life, and in particular, how he went about collecting all these books. Folger, of course, did not limit hims...

Shakespeare and his plays are woven deeply into the culture of the Caribbean, both white and black. Even after centuries of British colonial rule came to an end, Shakespeare endured, as we hear in this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited. There’s a long tradition in the British Caribbean of using Shakespeare quotations in competitions to demonstrate rhetorical skill, whether in the schoolyard or at r...

For the majority of audience members, Shakespeare is brought to life by the actors and actresses who speak his lines. Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells considered all of the most outstanding Shakespeare performers, from past to present, and essentially created his own personal Hall of Fame. He’s written about these artists in a book called "Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh." Wells sift...

The majority of Shakespeare’s plays call for singing — sometimes it’s part of the action, sometimes it seems to spring out of nowhere. And while the lyrics to the songs appear to have always been a part of the text, the musical notes for those lyrics have been lost over the years. Over four centuries of staging Shakespeare, directors have explored different approaches to filling in these musical g...

1606 was a critical year for Shakespeare’s creative career. It was the year in which he wrote KING LEAR, MACBETH, and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. It was also a time in which the king of England, James I, faced internal political challenges that threatened to tear the nation apart. James Shapiro is our guest for this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited. His new book, THE YEAR OF LEAR, examines how the event...

Just what exactly does it mean to edit the works of Shakespeare, particularly since we have no surviving manuscript copies? Why is it that new editions of the plays continue to be published? In this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited, Rebecca Sheir interviews Paul Werstine and Suzanne Gossett about the how and why of editing Shakespeare. Since 1989, Paul Werstine has been the co-editor of the Folger...

"Shakespeare Not Stirred" is the creation of two English professors who combined their love of the cocktail hour and their love of Shakespeare to write a collection of Bard-inspired cocktail and hors d’oeuvre recipes. This thoroughly modern book (released September 1, 2015) contains instructions for concocting drinks like “Kate’s Shrew-driver” and “Othello’s Green-eyed Monster.” The images of Shak...

If you were to make a list of the people who have left an enduring imprint on how the world interprets, understands, and receives Shakespeare, who would you choose? About a decade ago, Peter Holland, the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame, and Adrian Poole, the former Chair in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, set out to create a compendium that summed up the...