We could listen to Adrian Lester talk about acting all day… but he's a busy man, so we’ll settle for this 37 minute episode. The actor joins us to discuss some of his most famous performances, including Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s acclaimed 1991 all-male As You Like It, Hamlet with Peter Brook, and Henry V and Othello with Nicholas Hytner. Plus, Lester takes us back to his childhood in Birmingham and tells us about his patronage of the Everything to Everybody project and the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Lester is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Visit our website, folger.edu/unlimited, to learn more about Everything to Everybody and see video of Lester's performance in "As You Like It."

From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 4, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

On today’s episode, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s former Artistic Director takes a look back at four decades of staging Shakespeare. Greg Doran’s career as a Shakespearean director began in the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. By the time he stepped down as the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company earlier this year, Doran had directed every play in the First Folio, capping off the feat with an acclaimed production of Cymbeline.

In between, Doran helmed era-defining productions of Shakespeare’s plays and worked with actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and the late Antony Sher, to whom Doran was married.

Doran’s new memoir, My Shakespeare, tells the story of his life through the plays he has directed. It’s a portrait of an artist at work, shot through with commentary about the plays themselves and insights about working with actors. It’s also an intimate account of Doran’s deep artistic partnership with Tony Sher. Greg Doran is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio, is available from Methuen Drama.

From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 20, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Melvin Rickarby in Stratford and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Start with Shakespeare’s "star-crossed" lovers and fold in the songs of Swedish pop hitmaker Max Martin… what do you get? The hit Broadway musical & Juliet, currently running at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York and nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical.

The show imagines what would happen if Juliet woke up after Romeo’s death and decided not to end it all. Instead, she goes on a trip to Paris with some new friends, including Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Juliet discovers that Romeo isn’t really dead… but he’s also not exactly boyfriend material. And every so often, the characters break into song with Max Martin’s hits for Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and Katy Perry.

The writer behind this mash-up is David West Read. He previously served as writer and executive producer of the comedy series Schitt’s Creek, and he created The Big Door Prize and the forthcoming Brother from Another Mother, both running on AppleTV+. Host Barbara Bogaev talks with Read about & Juliet… and the concussion that inspired it.

Get tickets to & Juliet here, and tune in to the Tonys broadcast on Sunday, June 11 at 8 pm ET on CBS.

From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 6, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Claire Reynolds in Atlanta and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Robert O’Hara joins us to talk about directing last year’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III, starring Danai Gurira of Marvel's "Black Panther." He tells us about gathering a diverse cast of actors with disabilities, wanting to “trigger” his audiences, and what it’s like to get a call about directing Shakespeare in the Park (spoiler: it’s a whirlwind). Robert O’Hara is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

A film of Richard III premiered on PBS’s Great Performances on Friday, May 19, and is streaming now on the PBS App and at pbs.org/gperf.

Robert O’Hara is a two-time Obie Award and two-time NAACP Award Winner whose work has been seen around the country. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his direction of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play.

From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 23, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from CDM Studios in New York and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Eighteen of those plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, had never been published before they appeared in the First Folio, which means that without it, they might have been lost.

But how did the First Folio come to be? It turns out that this book's story has enough twists to fill out a five-act play. It has its own heroes, villains, and political subtext. And the success of the Folio itself was far from a sure thing. Dr. Chris Laoutaris's new book, Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare, re-examines everything we thought we knew about the publication of the First Folio, and uncovers some new information in the archives. He is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Chris Laoutaris is a biographer, historian, poet, Shakespeare scholar, and Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance and the Co-Founder of the EQUALityShakespeare (EQUALS) initiative. He is also the author of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe. Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare is out now from Pegasus Books.

From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 9, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Melvin Rickarby in Stratford-upon-Avon and Andy Plovnick at Bunker Studios in Brooklyn. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Lolita Chakrabarti is the playwright of Red Velvet, about 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge, and has adapted Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi for the stage. Now, she has adapted Maggie O'Farrell's bestselling novel Hamnet for the stage. Hamnet is currently playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre.

The play tells the story of a young Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare as they fall in love and start a family, and the psychological damage caused by the death of their son, Hamnet. Barbara Bogaev talks with Chakrabarti about adapting O'Farrell's story, how she portrays the Shakespeare family, and her earlier play Red Velvet.

Hamnet is onstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s newly restored Swan Theatre until June 17 and will open at London’s Garrick Theatre on September 30.

From the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 25, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Melvin Rickarby in Stratford and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Hamlet has been adapted, retold, and reinvented countless ways. But you’ve never seen a version of Hamlet quite like James Ijames’s Fat Ham, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and is now playing on Broadway. In Fat Ham, Ijames takes the outline of Hamlet and transposes it to the present day American South. Instead of “funeral baked meats,” Fat Ham serves up barbecue—expertly cooked by Rev, the Claudius character. The queer, Black Hamlet character is named Juicy. He isn’t on break from Wittenberg; he’s taking an online degree in human resources. After being visited by his father’s ghost, Juicy believes that his uncle murdered his father in order to marry his mother. And, just like Hamlet, Juicy has to decide what to do about it. But the way Ijames transforms Shakespeare’s premise makes Fat Ham into much more than a parody or an adaptation. James Ijames is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

James Ijames is the co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and the author of the acclaimed plays Kill Move Paradise, TJ Loves Sally 4Ever, and The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 11, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Haley Paskalides in Manhattan and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

In her book The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Marion Turner reacquaints us with a remarkable, vital character: Alison, Wife of Bath, the most famous fictional pilgrim in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Turner puts Alison into her historical context in 14th- and 15th-century England and the literary tradition, arguing that the Wife of Bath is literature’s first “ordinary woman,” neither a paragon of virtue nor a vicious caricature. Instead, she’s funny, sexual, opinionated, competent—a recognizably human character. That’s all the more remarkable for her having been written by a man.

Turner’s biography goes on to trace the afterlives of the Wife of Bath through reinterpretations and reworkings of the character. That includes Voltaire’s version, James Joyce’s Molly Blum, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film adaptation, a recent play by Zadie Smith, and her influence on Shakespeare. Turner is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Marion Turner is a professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is also the author of Chaucer: A European Life. The Wife of Bath: A Biography is available from Princeton University Press.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 28, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Eloise Stevens in Oxford and Jenna McClellan at VoiceTrax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

You might recognize Patrick Page from films like Spirited, or shows like The Gilded Age, or from his Broadway roles as Hades in Hadestown for which he was nominated for a Tony. But Page is also an accomplished Shakespearean, with a long relationship with Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he’s played Prospero, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Iago, and now King Lear. Page talks with Barbara Bogaev about getting inside Lear’s head and his long fascination with Shakespeare’s villains.

King Lear, starring Page and directed by Simon Godwin, is onstage at Shakespeare Theatre Company through April 16.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 14, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Ellen Rolfes in Washington, D.C. and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

The Folger: Hey ChatGPT! Could you write a six line Shakespearean monologue in iambic pentameter about an interview with Jennifer Black, Laura Turchi, and John Ladd about the challenges and opportunities that ChatGPT presents in the English classroom? Thank you!

ChatGPT: Of course, I'd be happy to write a Shakespearean monologue on that topic! Here it is:

Oh, how ChatGPT may bring the bard to light,

And in the English classroom, set things right.

With Jennifer, Laura, John to lead the way,

They'll show the world what ChatGPT can convey.

For in its code, a wealth of knowledge lies,

And students learn, to their great teachers' surprise.

Based on that monologue, Open AI's ChatGPT tool obviously believes that it can be a positive addition to the classroom. Should you share its optimistic outlook? Our host Barbara Bogaev talks with Jennifer Black of Boise State University, Laura Turchi of Arizona State University, and John Ladd of Washington and Jefferson College about the challenges and opportunities that artificial intelligence tools offer English teachers.

Check out this episode on our website to see a gallery of Shakespeare portraits "created" by Open AI's DALL-E tool, responding to prompts including "Shakespeare piloting a Shakespeare in the style of Cowboy Bebop," "Robot William Shakespeare in the style of John Singer Sargent," "Photorealistic image Shakespeare in cyberspace," and "Shakespeare sitting on a cliffside in a jungle working on a laptop."

Dr. Jennifer Black is a Lecturer in English Literature at Boise State University, where she teaches a broad range of undergraduate courses in literature and humanities. Her most recent publications focus on teaching Shakespeare online, leadership and ethics in Shakespeare’s plays, and flipping the college classroom.

Dr. John R. Ladd is an assistant professor in Computing and Information Studies at Washington & Jefferson College. His teaching and research focuses on the use of data across a wide variety of domains, especially in cultural and humanities contexts, as well as on the histories of information and technology. He has published essays and web projects on cultural analytics and humanities data science, the history of data, and network analysis.

Dr. Laura Turchi is a teacher educator specializing in English Language Arts. She co-authored Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach (Bloomsbury/Arden) with Ayanna Thompson and recently completed Teaching Shakespeare with Interactive Editions (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press ). Turchi is Clinical Professor in English at Arizona State University, where she directs curriculum development for “RaceB4Race: Sustaining, Building, Innovating” at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 28, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Shane McKeon, Kristin Vermilya, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.