That Shakespeare Life

We take it for granted that Shakespeare's theater was similar to ours, when in fact, the experience of stepping inside The Globe or other Elizabethan playhouses was quite different for Shakespeare than for us today.  To take us behind the curtain and explore the inside of The Globe theater, Richard Dutton is our guide today, helping explore the sights, sounds, and smells inside a real Elizabethan...

Shakespeare is often portrayed wearing bright purple poofy pumpkin pants, characteristic both of the time period and our impression of William. Today, Ninya Mikhaila, a professional historical costumer, joins us to share her experiences of recreating 17th century clothing, and tell us all about how William Shakespeare would have dressed.

Douglas joins us today to discuss marketing in the 16th century. With new plays performed as often as every afternoon, and a large portion of his target audience being illiterate, how did Shakespeare fill seats and manage to sell enough tickets to stay in business?  Douglas Bruster is a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on Shakespeare, drama, and liter...

Barbara Traister is the author of  The Notorious Astrological Physician of London , and  Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama , as well as former Professor of English at Lehigh University. She joins us today to look at some of Shakespeare's examples of medicine depicted in his plays and explore where Shakespeare got it right, and some of the hidden messages we can disco...

Glyn Jones joins us today to talk about kitchen gardens and estate gardens that impacted Shakespeare. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust maintains 5 gardens thought to have been part of William Shakespeare's home in Stratford and today Glyn Jones is going to help us explore whether or not Shakespeare had a garden himself, what purpose a garden might have served a playwright, and what sort of things woul...

Does William Shakespeare belong in the theater and not the literature department? Nigel Wood is a Professor of Literature at Loughborough University, specializing in early modern literature and the staging of dramatic texts. He joins us today to discuss the evolution of Shakespeare's plays as a result of reading what was intended to be performed. I will be asking Nigel about the significance of st...

Hazel Forsyth, Senior Curator of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Collections at the Museum of London, joins us today  to discuss a 2009 archeological find done by the Museum of London where they discovered, among other evidence of theater life in the 17th century, a set of period shoes near the site of the old Rose Theater, dating to within Shakespeare's lifetime. While the shoes themselves have no...

Grace Tiffany is a successful novelist, author, and professor of Shakespeare at Western Michigan University. Her first novel, My Father Had a Daughter , was published in 2003, and is a fictional tale about the life of Shakespeare's second daughter Judith. While fictional, the book brings the historical facts about Judith Quiney to life on the pages of her book. Since her debut novel, Grace has com...

Today's guest knows better than most that when you study Shakespeare, you almost synonymously study 17th century theater. Ben Crystal is an actor, writer, producer, adventurer & explorer of original practices in Shakespeare, and was the Artistic Director at Passion in Practice, an original practice based theatre company specializing in performances that rework the speech, rehearsal techniques, and...

Called "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," by Harold Bloom, Dr. David Bevington is an American literary scholar who specializes in British drama of the Renaissance, and has edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition. Dr. Bevington remains the only living scholar...

In this week's episode, we talk with Pauline Montagna about the focus of an entire chapter in her latest book, Not Wisely But Too Well which makes the claim that Edward Alleyn, and not Shakespeare, was the upstart crow insulted famously by Robert Greene. Alleyn was a rival actr competing in the 16th century with Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's lead performer. Pauline joins us today to unpack her re...

Whenever Shakespeare's plays are performed, there are always legends and stories which come up right along with them. We have Macbeth and the Scottish Play, as well as Romeo and Juliet and the famous misconstrued couplet in the final scene. Over the years, some of these stories have grown into famous anecdotes that no one is really sure where they started. No one, at least, except Paul Menzer. Thi...

In this episode I ask Dr. Bart Van Es,  author, historian, and Professor in English at the University of Oxford, about Richard Burbage.  We explore the life of Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's leading actor and the first man to play the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. You'll learn about what Richard Burbage looked like, his family, his hobbies, and how it was he and his father who really ga...

Jem Bloomfield is an author, blogger, and Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham.  His research ranges across Shakespeare, gender, performance and the Bible, with a particular focus on the ways texts are used to focus cultural authority. Dr. Bloomfield's work has been cited in The Guardian, The New Statesmen, and Contemporary Theater Review . His latest book is titled Sh...

Even Shakespeare had to eat. When you study food in 16th and 17th century England, we learn about the foods that would be served most often at banquets or before royalty. But what about the regular guy? What about William Shakespeare? In this episode, award winning food historian Francine Segan walks us through the kitchen of William Shakespeare to explore what foods the bard might have eaten for...

Expert British Historian Philippa Brewell helps us understand what life at court was like for William Shakespeare.