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 in 1984 at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He served as artistic director of the RSC from 1991 to 2002, and directed musicals like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on London’s West End as well as operas like Verdi’s Macbeth, Don Carlo, and Otello.

Now, Noble has written a new book, How to Direct Shakespeare, a no-nonsense guide for directors confronting the challenge of staging Shakespeare’s texts. Noble writes that Shakespeare presents unique challenges for actors and directors — but that his plays also serve as excellent preparation for all other directing work. For those of us who aren’t directors, Noble’s book is full of things we can look out for the next time we read one of Shakespeare’s plays or watch it onstage. Adrian Noble is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Adrian Noble’s new book, How to Direct Shakespeare, is available now. His previous book is How to Do Shakespeare.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 8, 2022. © 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 Rob Double at London Broadcast and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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 Grey in The Lord of the Rings films. McKellen is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 25, 2022. © 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 Rob Double at London Broadcast and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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. Last year, he played Hamlet in an age-blind production of the play at the Theatre Royal Windsor, returning to the role for the first time since 1971. Then, at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, McKellen played Hamlet again, speaking the part alongside a ballet dancer in a production directed by Peter Schaufuss. Now, he’s is appearing as King Hamlet’s ghost in an essay film about the play called Hamlet Within.

McKellen joined us from his home in East London for an extended conversation with Barbara Bogaev. In part 1 of our interview, we start by discussing the age-, gender-, and color-blind stage production of Hamlet he starred in last year, directed by Sean Mathias.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 11, 2022. © 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 Rob Double at London Broadcast and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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 argument University College London professor Helen Hackett makes in her new book, The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty, a wide-ranging study of the many conflicting ideas that Elizabethans had about their own minds. She concludes that the period marked an unusually rich moment for theories of consciousness and for the representation of thought in literature. Host Barbara Bogaev talks with Hackett about the four humors, anxiety about imagination, demonic possession, and more.

Helen Hackett is a professor of English at University College London. Her book The Elizabethan Mind was published by Yale University Press earlier this year.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 27, 2022. © 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. Leanor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California and Gareth Wood at The Sound Company in London. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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 of the Bard, and what Shakespeare may have thought of the play’s characters.  The Sunday, September 18, 2022 performance will be livestreamed at 2pm Pacific, and on-demand for 48 hours beginning Monday, September 19, 2022 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern time. Antony and Cleopatra is on stage September 10 through October 5, 2022. More information at . From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 12, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast 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 Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

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 was first done in the US and 15 years after it was first done in Canada. The production featured Paterson Joseph as Brutus, and he was so impressed by the experience that he wrote Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. The book takes an unflinching look at Joseph’s time at the RSC, both while working on Caesar and in the 1990s, when the son of St. Lucian parents found himself one of only four Black people in the building. He also writes about his early work, performing sharp and boldly reimagined Shakespeare with the Cheek by Jowl company; his thoughts about race in the British theater; the proper way to play Brutus; Received Pronunciation, and much more.

In 2018, Joseph was at the National Black Theater in Harlem, performing his one-man show, Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, about the first Black man in England to cast a vote. We invited him into the studio to talk about the book, Brutus, and more, and we bring that conversation to you again now. Paterson Joseph is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Paterson Joseph is an acclaimed British actor who has performed major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, including the title role in Othello; and the leads in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and The Emperor Jones. He has also worked extensively in film, and in television, including recently The Leftovers and Timeless. In 2015, he wrote and performed his one-man play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance on tour. Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play was published in the US by Methuen Drama, a division of Bloomsbury Books, in 2018.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Originally published May 29, 2018, and rebroadcast August 16, 2022. ©Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Bear It, As Our Roman Actors Do,” was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Robert Auld and Deb Stathopulos at the Radio Foundation in New York. Special thanks to ‘Illuminations’ for allowing us to use excerpts from their DVD of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar.

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 a little-known, unpublished manuscript that suggests such a link between these two great English writers.   Unfortunately, the Tabard Inn burned down in the great Southwark fire of 1676, so there’s no way of knowing the truth for sure. But even if it only was hearsay, this Shakespeare graffiti story—and the alehouse-centric connection between two writers over 200 years apart that it suggests—captures the imagination. Carlin talks with Rebecca Sheir about the anonymous diarist who wrote the account and what might have drawn Shakespeare and his pals to the Tabard Inn. Dr. Martha Carlin is a professor of history in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. © Folger Shakespeare Library. This podcast episode, "Betwixt Tavern and Tavern," was published July 15, 2015, and rebroadcast August 2, 2022. It was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Ben Lauer and Esther French are the web producers. We had help from Lisa Nalbandian at Wisconsin Public Radio.

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 to sign their names next to their favorite passages. As South African Shakespeare scholar David Schalkwyk explains to interviewer Rebecca Sheir, there is something special about "a book that had passed through the hands of the people who had saved my country." Schalkwyk shares some personal history and reveals what Shakespeare might have meant to the men who signed the Robben Island Shakespeare. David Schalkwyk is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He previously served as director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Plays, Literature and the Touch of the Real; and Shakespeare, Love and Service. His book about the Robben Island Shakespeare is titled Hamlet’s Dreams. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013.  From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Originally published in 2013, and rebroadcast July 19, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Cowards Die Many Times before Their Deaths; The Valiant Never Taste of Death but Once," was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers.

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 Space is a classic of theater writing. Over the course of his career, he directed actors including John Gielgud, Glenda Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Adrian Lester, Vivienne Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Patrick Stewart, and Frances de la Tour, and won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. When we spoke to Brook in 2019, his new play, Why?, co-written and co-directed by longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, was about to kick off a tour of China, Italy, and Spain, and his newest book, Playing by Ear: Reflections on Sound and Music, had just been released. Brook spoke with Barbara Bogaev about his remarkable career, his illustrious collaborators, and the process of making theater. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. This podcast episode, “My Age Is as a Lusty Winter,” was originally published December 10, 2019, and was rebroadcast July 5, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. It was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. With technical helped from Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Alan Leer at The Sound Company Studios in London.

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 all of our books got here?  We talk with economist and author Andrea Mays about The Millionaire and the Bard, her 2015 biography of Henry Clay Folger, who founded the Folger together with Emily Jordan Folger, his wife. Mays shares some of the fascinating financial and personal details of Folger's life: in particular, how he went about assembling the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. Mays is interviewed by Neva Grant. The Millionaire and the Bard was published by Simon & Schuster in 2015. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode, “Mine Own Library With Volumes That I Prize” was published November 18, 2015, and rebroadcast June 21, 2022. It was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers.