Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

By Folger Shakespeare Library

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What's Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited about?

Home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. Advancing knowledge and the arts. Discover it all at www.folger.edu. Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places—not just literature and the stage, but science and social history as well. Our "Shakespeare Unlimited" podcast explores the fascinating and varied connections between Shakespeare, his works, and the world around us.

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Lucy Wooding on Tudor Engla...

01.31.2023

We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty and its soap-opera twists. But in her book Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding argues that to really know the Tudors you must look past the famous names and racy ...

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited episodes:

01.31.2023 Lucy Wooding on Tudor England: A History We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty and its soap-opera twists. But in her book Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding argues that to really know the Tudors you must look past the famous names and racy ...
01.17.2023 Debra Ann Byrd on Becoming Othello: A Black Girl's Journey Theater-maker Debra Ann Byrd has played Othello in three different productions: first, in a staged reading in 2013, then again in 2015 and 2019. Each time, she learned a little bit more about Othello, and about herself. In her one-woman ...
01.03.2023 Ian Smith on Black Shakespeare In his new book, Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race, Dr. Ian Smith of Lafayette College argues that Shakespeare’s plays engage with questions of race and early modern encounters between Africans and Europeans in ways that the discipline of Shakespeare ...
12.20.2022 Talene Monahon on Her New Revenge Comedy, Jane Anger In Talene Monahon’s new play Jane Anger, a narcissistic William Shakespeare is wrestling with writers’ block while working on King Lear. When Will’s former flame Jane Anger shows up, he knows she can help him finish the play. But Jane ...
12.06.2022 Fiona Ritchie on Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble You may not have heard of Sarah Siddons, but if you’ve seen a production of Macbeth recently, you may have experienced her influence. In the late 18th century, Siddons became one of the first celebrity actors, for her performances in ...
11.22.2022 Billy Collins on Writing Short Poems and Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets Billy Collins is one of America’s most well-known poets. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. His poetry collections frequently show up on bestseller lists, and his popular readings—three of which we’ve been lucky to host at ...
11.08.2022 Adrian Noble on How to Direct Shakespeare A director makes a play add up to more than the sum of its parts. That's something Adrian Noble knows as well as anyone. Noble has directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays, including Kenneth Branagh’s breakout performance as Henry V ...
10.25.2022 Ian McKellen on Richard III, Macbeth, and Gandalf In the second part of our special extended interview with Sir Ian McKellen, he tells us about some of his most famous roles: playing Macbeth opposite Dame Judi Dench, King Richard III with a screenplay he co-wrote, and Gandalf the ...
10.11.2022 Ian McKellen on Playing Hamlet He played Hamlet in his thirties… and again in his eighties. In between? Edgar, Romeo, Leontes, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Iago, Richard III, Prospero, and King Lear. Plus, of course, Magneto and Gandalf. On this episode, we talk with Sir Ian McKellan. ...
09.27.2022 What Shakespeare Thought About the Mind, with Helen Hackett If you’ve ever been watching Hamlet and asked yourself, “What on earth is Hamlet thinking?!” you’re not alone. But to figure that out, you might have to figure out what Hamlet—and Shakespeare—think about what it means to think. That’s the ...
09.12.2022 John Adams Gives Antony and Cleopatra the Operatic Treatment Celebrated American composer John Adams’s newest opera takes its inspiration from Shakespeare. . Adams talks with host Barbara Bogaev about how he turned a five-act play into a two-act opera—which scenes got the hook, new lines written in the style ...
08.16.2022 Paterson Joseph: Julius Caesar and Me (Rebroadcast) This summer marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their 2012 Julius Caesar was Britain’s first ever high-profile production of a Shakespeare play with an all-Black cast—a milestone that came 76 years after it ...
08.02.2022 Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Tabard Inn, with Martha Carlin (Rebroadcast) What if Shakespeare and his friends had gotten together and carved their names on the wall of an inn made famous by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? In 2015, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Dr. Martha Carlin found an anecdote in ...
07.20.2022 The Robben Island Shakespeare, with David Schalkwyk (Rebroadcast) While Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on South Africa's Robben Island, one of the other political prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam, managed to retain a copy of Shakespeare's complete works. Venkatrathnam secretly circulated the book to many of his fellow prisoners—including Mandela—asking them ...
07.05.2022 Peter Brook (Rebroadcast) Legendary director Peter Brook died last week at the age of 97. Brook was one of theater’s most influential directors. His 1970 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is among that play’s most lauded and best-known productions. His 1968 book The Empty ...
06.21.2022 Andrea Mays on The Millionaire and the Bard (Rebroadcast) 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. The Folger Shakespeare Library celebrated its 90th birthday this past April. Did you ever wonder how ...
06.07.2022 Joe Papp and Shakespeare in the Park, with Kenneth Turan (Rebroadcast) Joe Papp was responsible for some of modern American theater's most iconic institutions: New York City's free Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater. The whole idea of "Off-Broadway." We spoke with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan about ...
05.24.2022 Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn on Their Hamlet Opera A new opera version of Hamlet is onstage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera through June 9. Composer Brett Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn talk with host Barbara Bogaev about adapting the texts of the earliest editions of Hamlet to create ...
05.10.2022 Shakespeare and Ukraine, with Irena Makaryk Director Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas’s 1920 Macbeth was the first production of a Shakespeare play in Ukraine. Kurbas staged the play in the midst of the famine and violence of the Russian Civil War: Lady Macbeth fainted from hunger in the ...
04.26.2022 Leonard Barkan on Reading Shakespeare Reading Me In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes that theater holds a “mirror up to nature.” In his new book, Princeton professor Leonard Barkan tells us that when he reads Shakespeare, it holds a mirror up to Leonard Barkan—and that when you read Shakespeare, ...
04.12.2022 Pamela Hutchinson on Asta Nielsen's Hamlet In 1921, Asta Nielsen, one of the world’s biggest movie star in the world had just formed her own production company, and decided to open it up by playing Hamlet. Plenty of women had done that on the stage in ...
03.29.2022 How the Commedia Dell'Arte's Actresses Changed the Shakespearean Stage, with Pamela Allen Brown English women didn’t act on London’s professional stages until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. But Dr. Pamela Allen Brown, author of The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage, argues that star actresses from Italy altered both plays and ...
03.15.2022 Matías Piñeiro on His Shakespeare-Adjacent Films An Argentine woman translates "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" while incessantly taping travel postcards to a wall. An actress in Buenos Aires seduces her colleague while rehearsing a scene for "Twelfth Night." A theater troupe flirts its way through rehearsals of ...
03.01.2022 Molly Yarn on Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors' Over the centuries there have been hundreds of editions of Shakespeare’s plays: Small, inexpensive schoolbook copies of individual plays, massive, leatherbound editions of the complete works, and everything in between. At some point, every one of those editions passed under ...
02.15.2022 Stephen Marche on How Shakespeare Changed Everything Even 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare’s influence is profound. But is it right to say that he changed everything? That the assertion Stephen Marche makes in his book "How Shakespeare Changed Everything." In the book, Marche catalogs Shakespeare’s ...
02.01.2022 Black Women Shakespeareans, 1821 – 1960, with Joyce Green MacDonald Between 1821 and 1960, it would have been vanishingly rare to see a Black woman onstage performing Shakespeare. In Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald’s chapter in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, “Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance,” she ...
01.18.2022 Cutting Plays for Performance, with Aili Huber It might surprise you to learn that just about every production of a Shakespeare play that you’ve ever seen onstage has been cut, from student shows to Broadway revivals. Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide, a new ...
01.04.2022 J.R. Thorp on Learwife A banished queen receives word that her husband and three daughters are dead. Learwife, a new novel by J.R. Thorp, picks up where Shakespeare’s King Lear leaves off: The queen is Berte, Lear’s wife and Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia’s mother, ...
12.21.2021 Lena Cowen Orlin on The Private Life of William Shakespeare Dr. Lena Cowen Orlin’s new book, The Private Life of Shakespeare, isn’t exactly a biography. Rather, it’s an exhaustive return to the primary sources that document Shakespeare’s life, a book that scholar James Shapiro says “demolishes shoddy claims and biased ...
12.07.2021 Sir Antony Sher (Rebroadcast) Sir Antony Sher, one the greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries, died in December, 2021, in Stratford Upon Avon. He was 72. In 2018, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Sir Antony and, to ...
11.24.2021 Holidays in Shakespeare's England, with Erika T. Lin Many of us have holiday traditions: we trim trees, spin dreidels, trick-or-treat, set off fireworks, and host parties. People had holiday traditions in Shakespeare’s time too: they crossdressed, roleplayed, acted in amateur theatricals, fought, ate pancakes, and watched cockfights. If ...
11.09.2021 Bringing Latinx Voices to Shakespeare, with Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa both grew up speaking English and Spanish, and they share memories of being made to feel like their voices, dialects, and identities weren’t “good enough” for Shakespeare. Now, both DeCure and Espinosa are vocal ...
10.26.2021 Shakespeare's Language and Race, with Patricia Akhimie and Carol Mejia LaPerle Close reading of Shakespeare is not a new concept. But this kind of close reading is more challenging—and it can help us interpret Shakespeare’s words in new and profound ways. Our guests are two contributors to the new Cambridge Companion ...
10.12.2021 Shakespeare in Latinx Communities, with José Cruz González and David Lozano Theater artists José Cruz González and David Lozano join us in this episode. Their conversation “On Making Shakespeare Relevant to Latinx Communities” appears in the new book Shakespeare and Latinidad. González and Lozano talk with Barbara Bogaev about adapting and ...
09.28.2021 Shakespeare and the British Royal Family, with Gordon McMullan Shakespeare wrote a lot about English kings and queens. Over the last three hundred years, a lot of English kings and queens have gotten really into Shakespeare. Our guest Gordon McMullan is the Principal Investigator of Making History: Shakespeare and ...
09.14.2021 Mike Lew on Teenage Dick In Mike Lew's play "Teenage Dick," Richard, a high-school senior with cerebral palsy, is determined to become class president by any means necessary. Commissioned by theater artist Gregg Mozgala and The Apothetae, the company Mogzala started to explore the disabled ...
08.31.2021 Mona Awad on All's Well In her new novel, "All’s Well," author Mona Awad combines elements of Shakespeare's "All’s Well That Ends Well" and "Macbeth" and the 1999 movie "Election" to tell the story of Miranda Fitch, a theater professor with a mutinous cast of ...
07.20.2021 How We Hear Shakespeare's Plays, with Carla Della Gatta In Shakespeare’s time, people talked about going to hear a play and going to see one in equal measure. So, what exactly do we hear when we hear one of Shakespeare’s plays? What information do we gather from its words, ...
07.06.2021 The Restoration Reinvention of Shakespeare The next time someone complains about a director changing or tampering with Shakespeare… we’ve got an answer for them. The first generation of theater artists after Shakespeare weren’t particularly concerned about performing Shakespeare's plays the way they appear in the ...
06.22.2021 Madeline Sayet on Where We Belong In her play "Where We Belong," Mohegan director playwright, and performer Madeline Sayet recalls her 2015 journey to the UK to pursue the PhD in Shakespeare that she never ended up getting. The play, now available in a world premiere ...
06.08.2021 Geoffrey Marsh on Shakespeare's Neighbors What would we find out about you if we got to know your neighbors? What if we took a walk around the neighborhood where you live? That's the way that Geoffrey Marsh hopes to learn more about Shakespeare in his ...
05.25.2021 Race and Blackness in Elizabethan England When did the concept of race develop? How far should we look back to find the attitudes that bolster white supremacy? We ask Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, an assistant professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, and the author of a ...
05.11.2021 All the Sonnets of Shakespeare Over 400 years after Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in 1609, what is left to learn? "All the Sonnets of Shakespeare," a new edition of the sonnets published in 2020, takes some bold steps to help us look at the ...
04.27.2021 "Richard III" in Prison Frannie Shepherd-Bates founded Shakespeare in Prison in 2012. Nine years later, SIP is the signature community program of the Detroit Public Theatre, and has worked on a total of eight plays with a women’s ensemble at Huron Valley Correctional Facility ...
04.13.2021 Simon Godwin on "Romeo and Juliet" The National Theatre’s new production of "Romeo and Juliet" was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production’s director, was tasked with turning it into a 90-minute film shot entirely ...
03.30.2021 Shakespeare and Lost Plays Today, the texts of roughly three thousand plays from the great age of Elizabethan theater are lost to us. The plays that remain constitute only a sixth of all of the drama produced during that period. How do we make ...
03.16.2021 Stephen Hopkins and "Stephano" He was in a shipwreck. He was at Jamestown. He was on the Mayflower. And maybe, just maybe, he’s in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Documentary filmmaker Andrew Buckley’s ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, was the only passenger on the Mayflower who had previously ...
03.02.2021 Meme García on "house of sueños" For generations, artists have been shaping and changing Shakespeare to fit their times. The best adaptations add specific textures of place and culture, or a fluidity of language that can take centuries-old work and make it brand new. Seattle Shakespeare ...
02.16.2021 Shakespeare in the Harlem Renaissance When you think about the Harlem Renaissance, theater might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But, says Dr. Freda Scott Giles, theater played a significant role in the blossoming of Black American arts and culture of the ...
02.02.2021 Naomi Miller on Mary Sidney Herbert and "Imperfect Alchemist" Dr. Naomi Miller’s novel "Imperfect Alchemist" is about one of early modern England’s most significant literary figures: a poet, playwright, translator, scientist, and colleague of writers like Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, John Donne, and Emilia Lanier Bassano. Her ...

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