Something Shakespeare This Way Comes

In 1769, a famous actor decided to host a giant event in honor of the man who helped make him famous: Shakespeare. It did not go as planned. While the Shakespeare Jubilee ended up being kind of a disaster, its aim to uphold the genius of Shakespeare ended up panning out pretty well. After all, a few hundred years later, we are all singing the praises of this immortal poet. In this episode, we talk...

Say what you want about Achilles, but everyone definitely does know his name. This episode we're talking all things Achilles. What the ancient Greeks thought about him, how he shows up in The Iliad , extreme fanboy Alexander the Great, his character in Troilus and Cressida , and some more modern takes on him as well. We'll be talking a lot about the nature of his relationship with Patroclu...

Bonus content for my fellow Greek mythology nerds out there! This episode we are talking the role of the gods in the Trojan War, how they appear in The Iliad, and how they show up in other retellings of the war, including Shakespeare, of course. Really, this was all an elaborate excuse for me to talk about the 2004 movie Troy. Join me as we consider why the gods are involved in mythology and the T...

Why do people dislike Twelfth Night ? Because it's the internet, sometimes the reasoning is silly, but as when it comes to any piece of art, there's always a valid reason to dislike something. Could it be because you dislike the genre of the play? Maybe! I'm on vacation this week, so bringing you a previously recorded episode before finding our way back to the mythology discussion. Ple...

Lovers of Greek mythology (and Shakespeare), rise up! If you thought you might like Shakespeare better if he just talked about a mythological figure for once, you’re in luck. In Troilus and Cressida , Shakespeare covers some of the last days of the Trojan War, including some of the mythical heroes you all know and love, turns most of them into complete jerks, and then features a pair of young love...

Ever have to do close reading for a literature class and did you find it kind of fun or incredibly painful? Maybe you just spun some masterful BS to hit the word count. Today we’re going to be approaching Shakespeare much in the same way, thinking about why we do close reading and then giving it a try. It’s probably not surprising that as an English major, I usually ended up finding close reading...

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play? Do you consider your favorite to be on brand for you? And does anyone else feel extreme pressure when asked what their favorite book is to give a perfect answer even though such a thing isn’t possible? In this episode, we’ll be having a little fun, looking at a selection of Shakespeare plays and determining what kind of person you are if, say, Hamlet is you...

To give or not to give a one-star review? That can sometimes be the question when you are faced with reading and rating a classic that doesn’t live up to the glorious tales everyone has been telling about it. And that’s especially true when it comes to one of Shakespeare’s most famous and highly renowned plays, Hamlet . Whether you love or hate Hamlet (or even just feel sort of meh about it), we c...

Do the sonnets really prove that Shakespeare was gay? Listen, when has anything ever proven anything about Shakespeare? More than any other piece of writing he left behind, Shakespeare's sonnets invite a lot of speculation and excitement about his biography. Throughout time people have thought that they would be able to figure out who this young man is and the identity of the woman that he mus...

The Ides of March have come and gone but I’m not quite done talking about Julius Caesar (the guy) or Julius Caesar (the play). This play is harder to get into than some of Shakespeare’s other delightful works. To help explain why and to try to figure out where Shakespeare was coming from, I’ve read some Plutarch, gotten more context for how a sixteenth century audience might have thought about Rom...

Do you get super excited to tell everyone to "Beware the Ides of March" every year or are you normal? Julius Caesar is a tricky play because I think it largely comes across as boring with a cool stabbing scene tucked into the middle of it. But, the events surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar were extremely dramatic and held a lot of emotional weight and significance, in additio...

Have you ever watched a movie and thought it was really giving Shakespeare vibes even though it wasn’t based on one of his plays? In this episode we are playing fast and loose with the meaning of adaptation by looking at two movies that are in conversation with Shakespeare but aren’t adaptations in the traditional sense. Join me and Gabbi Miller as we talk the scandalous and shocking Saltburn and...

Do Romeo and Juliet belong in the highest levels of Shakespeare canon or are they more mid? I explore this question and more in this episode, as I work my way through some of Shakespeare's most beloved plays and most notorious couples to decide where they should be ranked on a tier system of my own devising. The main method I used to determine where couples should fall was mostly vibes and how...

Who wants to relive English class from when you were a teenager? What if I'm the one doing it? I've been thinking lately about the Shakespeare we read in school and how sometimes that introduction can make or break your relationship with him. And it made me wonder...was my experience reading Shakespeare in high school similar to everyone else? Did we all have to read Romeo and Juliet (spoi...

In the immortal words of Viola, “I am the man.” That’s right, we are talking about Twelfth Night and everyone’s enduring obsession with how it plays with gender, what it tells us about gender, and how all the gender expansiveness is not something solely conceived of by a modern audience. You like Viola? We talk Viola. You like hearing about strange biological misconceptions of people living in the...

What kind of guy do you think Shakespeare was? This episode, we’re delving into the world of imagination as we consider the proud tradition of storytelling and speculation when it comes to Shakespeare biography. Stephen Greenblatt’s National Book Award Winning biography of Shakespeare weaves a rich tapestry that gets inside the mind of one of England’s greatest playwrights. At times these efforts...

IN FAIR VERONA we set our scene and Baz Luhrmann presents us a fever dream of a film. Amanda Bain Wysocki joins me to discuss the classic 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet , the punk rock Shakespeare adaptation many Millennials discovered as their gateway drug to the Bard. Between Amanda’s special edition DVD and insight into the director’s commentary and me scraping various articles...

Spoiler alert: Everyone dies. Except when they don't. But the title character does. Except when they don't. The is the second part of my two part series on how genre applies to Shakespearean drama. (If you haven't listened to the previous episode on comedy and tragicomedy, you might want to check that out first.) When it comes to tragedies, is it fair to say that those are the plays wh...

This episode started as an article, but it turns out you would all prefer to listen to stuff, so now it’s a podcast episode! You want to listen to stuff, not read stuff, and I respect that. So, I dug out a little article I wrote after doing some research and recording on The Tempest and have created an audio version of it for your listening pleasure. In this episode, I look at Michel de Montaigne’...

Make ‘em laugh! Make ‘em cry? Make ‘em feel…weird??? We are talking genre! Specifically the genres of Shakespeare’s plays, how we started to categorize the plays into these genres in the first place, and how that’s affected our reading of and study of the plays since. I also cover what constituted a comedy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how it’s not as straightforward as you would...

Today we are taking a little detour into the world of internet reviews of the classics. What are people saying about The Tempest , Macbeth , and Romeo and Juliet exactly? Sometimes, nothing good.   The internet these days is so driven by the algorithm but in a weird way that forces us to give the things we like five stars and to vigilantly defend against anything one star. The world of book review...

But hark! What light from yonder window breaks? It is Shakespeare in Love and this episode I’m joined by a guest to discuss it. Join us to hear about historical accuracy (or lack thereof), how Elizabethan in theater could in some way resemble Hollywood, and whether it tracks that Shakespeare became a great playwright because he fell in love with a random noblewoman who just wants to act on stage....

Who would have thought that picking up Bill Bryson's little Shakespeare biography would unlock so many thoughts in my brain? I picked up this bio to read because it was available at the library and pretty easy to get through. Then, I had a lot of thoughts and feelings I pursued some other biographical things that turned into this episode. Today we'll be talking about Bill Bryson's take...

What's this mine eyes spy? A bonus episode? Yea, verily! My next full episode is going to start getting more fully into Shakespeare biography, as in, biographies that have been written about him and what those works do or don't do with the details we have of his life. But to better appreciate that discussion, we need to first know what the details of his life are, as we understand them. In...

Knock knock, who’s there? It’s me, with an episode on The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), the latest film adaptation of the Scottish play. Directed by a Cohen brother and produced by A24, the movie does give some low-key horror vibes, especially in the creeptastic portrayal of the Weird Sisters. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are unsurprisingly great. But what is this adaptations deal, exactly...