Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

No two theater directors approach Shakespeare’s plays in the same way. When it comes to setting, blocking, costuming, casting, and cutting, there are countless ways directors can shape Shakespeare to make his works their own. It’s with this sense of infinite possibility in mind that we invited two theater directors to join us for a conversation about how they approach Shakespeare. What goes in to...

The Folger started with Henry and Emily Folger, two collectors who loved books and Shakespeare and had the means to pursue what they loved. They were supported by booksellers, who make their livelihoods poring through collections of books and ephemera and bringing those items to the people who want them. "The Booksellers," a new documentary directed by D.W. Young, explores the New York rare book w...

Who were the actors who first performed Shakespeare’s plays? You might know the names of some of the King’s Men—the company of which Shakespeare was a shareholder—like Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, or Robert Armin. But who were their co-stars? How were they cast? And what was it like to watch their performances? In this episode, we talk to Dr. Lucy Munro, author of the latest book in Bloomsbury’s S...

Every artist needs inspiration. In this episode, we talk to Sir Jonathan Bate. His book How the Classics Made Shakespeare, published by Princeton University Press in 2019, explores the Greek and Roman authors, narratives, and ideas that suffuse Shakespeare’s works. He was interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Sir Jonathan Bate is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State Universit...

A young woman falls asleep in the 21st century and slowly finds herself slipping into 16th-century England, where she falls in love with an obscure young poet named Will. Sandra Newman’s new novel The Heavens crosses genres. You could call it historical fiction, with its meticulously accurate 16th-century details. You could call it science fiction for its use of time travel and parallel worlds. It...

It’s quite a list: Hanged. Prison fever. Stabbed. Stabbed. Poisoned. Beheaded. Beheaded. “Malady of France.” Cannonball. Burnt. Bitten. Eaten. Mauled. Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things, but he really wrote a lot about death. Chemist and science communicator Dr. Kathryn Harkup’s new book is Death By Shakespeare. In it, she takes her readers through a fulsome exploration of death in the plays...

Do you have a passage from Shakespeare that you return to in difficult times? Is there a sonnet or soliloquy you keep coming back to for comfort or wisdom? This episode of Shakespeare Unlimited will be a little different. We sat down with the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, and his predecessor in that office, Director Emerita Gail Kern Paster, to talk about the bits of Shakespeare that bring t...

Today, we think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a triumph. We read them, puzzle over them, and recite them. We compare our significant others to summers’ days, beweep our outcast states, and never admit impediments to the marriage of true minds. But it might surprise you to learn that in the past, the Sonnets didn’t have quite the same great reputation. We asked Roehampton University professor Jane Ki...

Is there a right way to interpret Shakespeare’s plays? No, says Oxford University’s Emma Smith, and there’s a good reason for that. In her new book, This Is Shakespeare, she writes that Shakespeare’s plays are characterized by gaps—unknowable elements and unanswered questions that require us to insert our own readings. These gaps, opened up by history, dramatic from, and Shakespeare’s tendencies a...

Despite our country feeling more divided than it has in 50 years, there are still things that tie us together. Loving our families, cheering on a favorite team, and—according James Shapiro—Shakespeare. Shapiro is an eminent Shakespeare scholar, who, like many Americans, has found himself confused and troubled lately by the divisions in our country. And as an eminent Shakespeare scholar, he looked...

There are lots of stories about Abraham Lincoln and his passion for Shakespeare. Some are true, while others are made up out of whole cloth. We talk to scholar Michael Anderegg about Lincoln’s love of Shakespeare and the anecdotes that recount it. Why do these stories fascinate us? What can they tell us about Lincoln, and about Shakespeare’s place in the American story? Michael Anderegg is Chester...

You probably know where Shakespeare got the ideas for his plays. The Histories come from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Caesar and other Roman plays depend on Plutarch’s Lives. The Comedy of Errors comes from Plautus’s Menaechmi. Troilus and Cressida borrows from the Illiad. The Winter’s Tale repackages Robert Greene’s Pandosto. But what if we told you that a number of his plays draw inspiration from fol...

Do you have a book that means something special to you? 400 years ago, when printed books were a fairly new thing, they meant something to their owners too. But what they meant was, in many ways, much different from what they mean today. In this episode we talk to two authors about how people read, acquired, and collected books in Shakespeare’s time. Stuart Kells is the author of Shakespeare’s Lib...

Did Shakespeare intend to publish his sonnets? For whom were they written? What do they reveal about their author? We talk to Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith about her newest book, The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. The book is a social history of the sonnets’ reception, starting with a glowing 1598 review that it's likely practically no one ever read...

We’re willing to bet that at some point in school, you read at least of one Shakespeare’s plays. Did you ever wonder why that is? How did Shakespeare go from popular entertainment to freshman-year staple? Professor Joseph Haughey of Northwest Missouri State University takes us back to a time when educators didn’t take Shakespeare seriously and English wasn’t even a subject in school. Haughey’s res...

In this episode, we spend 40 minutes with one of the world’s most influential directors. Peter Brook has directed John Gielgud, Glenda Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Adrian Lester, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, and Patrick Stewart. His 1970 "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" is that among the play’s most lauded and best known productions. His 1968 book "The Empty Space," now an e-book from Nick Hern Books, is...

Director Kenny Leon’s production of "Much Ado About Nothing" mesmerized audiences during last summer’s Shakespeare in the Park. Now, you can watch this exuberant, sassy, and political performance, starring "Orange is the New Black’s" Danielle Brooks, on PBS’s Great Performances. We talked to Kenny Leon about how he approaches a new production and how Shakespeare’s comedies speak to our present mom...

Think there were no women onstage in Shakespeare’s time? Think again. We talk to scholar Clare McManus about where and how women performed in early modern Europe: emerging from mechanical seashells in elaborate court masques, dancing across tightropes, and on the stages of the European Continent. Clare McManus is a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Ro...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author Mark Haddon’s books take twists and turns that sometimes seem to only make sense in the context of his stories. Shakespeare’s  Pericles takes twists and turns that sometimes seem to make no sense at all. Haddon’s new novel, The Porpoise, reinterprets Pericles: the book is a crazy, imaginative ride that swings between continents, between...

In the 19th century, a new influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy arrived in the United States. Many of them settled in the Lower Manhattan. Reformers wondered how these new arrivals could be assimilated into American culture. Their solution? Give ‘em Shakespeare. But at the same time, these recent immigrants were staging Shakespeare’s plays themselves, in their own languages and adapt...

In September, the world of literary scholarship got some big news. It was discovered that a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia, once belonged to John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. The First Folio contains what experts now widely believe to be Milton’s notes on Shakespeare, in his own handwriting. Suddenly, we can read what one of the greatest English l...

“If, with Shakespeare, we can thrill and tease an audience into embracing unknowing, that is one of the most important gifts that we can give,” says director Iqbal Khan. Khan has directed at Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End, and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he staged Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Tartuffe, and Othello. We talked to Khan about race in Shakespeare’s pl...

It’s not easy to turn a Shakespeare’s play into an opera, says Colleen Fay. They have too many words, too many characters, and too many plots. But sometimes, when it all comes together, a great opera can bring the essence of Shakespeare’s stories sharply into focus. We talk to Colleen Fay about the history of Shakespearean operas… and find out which ones work and which ones don’t. Fay is a former...

In Act 3, scene 4 of Othello, Othello tells Desdemona that the handkerchief he gave her was “dyed in mummy.” What does that mean? According to Lafayette College’s Ian Smith, it means the handkerchief was dyed black. In this episode, originally broadcast in June 2016, we talk to Smith and Ayanna Thompson about Elizabethan modes of blackface—which included covering a performer’s body with dyed cloth...

You probably have a mental image of the Victorian Era. Straitlaced, rigid, and repressed, right? Meet Charlotte Cushman, born 1816. She was an actor known for playing traditionally male roles, like Romeo and Hamlet. She managed her own career and demanded to be paid as much as her male counterparts. She spent her life in a series of romantic relationships with women. And she was an international s...