The History Of European Theatre

Episode 237:

Later in life Shakespeare was creating his plays with two very different performance spaces in mind, the Globe and the Blackfriars, but probably also with a mind to the portability of plays for when they were taken to the court and into the country on tour. Performing Shakespeare in spaces not specifically designed for the theatre experience has, since then, been a maintained tradition not just in the UK but in worldwide locations. In his book ‘Site Specific Shakespeare’ author Benjamin Blyth examines case studies of different types of performance spaces and how they affect the performances and are used by the practitioners involved. Ben’s study is rooted in his own practical experience of theatre making and offers a fascinating insight into the diversity, challenges, and benefits of working with Shakespeare in different spaces.

Benjamin Blyth is a lecturer of Medieval and Early Modern Literature at St. Mary’s University and the University of Calgary. A scholar-practitioner with ten years’ experience directing Shakespeare around the world, Ben specialises in site-specificity and practice-as-research. His work has appeared in critical articles for Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Miranda; and his book Site-Specific Shakespeare was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Ben’s doctoral monograph, Shakespeare in Shoreditch, will be published by Arden Bloomsbury in January 2027.

Links to 'Site Specific Shakespeare'

Cambridge University Press: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009617376

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Specific-Shakespeare-Elements-Performance/dp/1009617362/ref=sr_1_1/

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Site-Specific-Shakespeare-Elements-Performance-ebook/dp/B0GY5KMBMF/ref=sr_1_1/

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

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www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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Episode 236:

During the days when the theatres were closed due to the plague, we don’t know if Shakespeare accompanied the King’s Men of tour, holed up in London or returned to Stratford-Upon-Avon for an extended stay, but when he emerged from whatever the Jacobean version of lockdown was, he had a new play ready for the 1611 reopening of the theatres and it was one that carried on with his recent experimentations in theatre.

The dating of the play

The early printing of the play

The sources for the play

A synopsis of the plot

Leontes as a king with some recognisable characteristics

James 1st and Arabella Stuart

The trial of Hermionie

Paulina – the politically aware woman

The not quite happy ending

Forgiveness, redemption and the passage of time

‘He exits pursued by a bear’

The pastoral act of the play

Perdita, nature, art, and the meaning of flowers

Honesty and the character and role of Autolocus

The ‘reanimation’ of Hermionie

The critical and performance history of the play

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Episode 235:

Last time I took a first look at ‘The Alchemist’ where Ben Jonson mixed farcical comedy with satire and more serious commentary on the society of the 1610s. The play is notable, among other things, for having the time of plague as it’s setting. It is, I think, the only play from that time to do this. And that was the jumping off point for my conversation with Kay Daly who makes a welcome return to the podcast after having previously discussed Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s world view. Those episodes are still out there on the podcast archive and, I think, well worth a listen if you haven’t done so already.

Kay Daly is a writer, novelist, book and theatre reviewer, teacher, and public humanities advocate. Since earning her Ph.D. in English Literature from Northwestern University, she has written for a variety of publications and organizations including The Chicago Review of Books, TimeOut Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, WNET New York Public Media, The Library of Virginia’s blog UnCommonwealth, Dramatics Magazine, and Centerstage Chicago. She also teaches adult enrichment courses focusing on arts and humanities at the Newberry Library in Chicago. And at the end of this episode you can hear a bit about her debut novel which is also concerned with the world of Ben Jonson and is due out in April 2027.

I spoke to Kay from her home over a zoom call.

Link to Kay's website: https://www.kaydalywriter.com

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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Episode 234: 

In 1610 Ben Jonson was penning what is often considered to be his most comic of comedies.  Johnson was well into his middle age, being thirty-eight years old in 1610 and had several years of producing masques for the court behind him, but with the initial failure of ‘Epicene’ the previous year on the public stage still, no doubt, ringing in his ears.  How much that failure influenced Jonson to turn to high comedy in ‘The Alchemist’ is difficult to say but the play is still one packed with satire, classical allusion, and comment on current fads and fashions, so still a very Jonsonian play.

The early performance history of the play

The source material for the play

The early print history of the play

The Acrostic summary of the play

A not very brief but necessary summary of the play

The play as a farce

The vices as drivers for the plot

The prologue

The role of Alchemy in the play

Models for Subtle, the alchemist

The character of the main protagonists through their names:

Face, Subtle, Sir Epicure Mammon, Drugger, Dapper, Kastril, and Dame Pliant

The later performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month

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Episode 233:

Did you know that in 2023 you could have seen the play at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London presented in Juba Arabic using a translation by Joseph Abuk which he had produced for the South Sudan Theatre Company in 2011?  Cymbeline like all Shakespeare plays has been translated and performed in many languages and productions and publications using translations account for a large part of global reach. In his book ‘If This Be Magic’ Daniel Hahn explores the world of translating Shakespeare and looks at the challenges and benefits of Shakespeare in translation.  By examining some of the very big and very small decisions a translator has to make when faced with a Shakespeare text Daniel takes the reader into a world or words and meanings and ponders the question of how does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word has been changed?

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. His recent work alongside ‘If This Be Magic: the unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation’, include translations of fiction from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru.  He is currently co-editing (with Padma Viswanathan) The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, and re-translating a French children's classic.

Daniel very kindly fitted me into his very busy schedule, so I spoke to him over a zoom call from his hotel room in Nepal where he is about to hold some workshops for translators.

Links to ‘If This Be Magic:

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-This-Magic-Shakespeare-Translation/dp/1805301624/ref=sr_1_1?

Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/If-This-Magic-Shakespeare-Translation/dp/0593801660/ref=sr_1_1?

UK Publishers Website: https://canongate.co.uk/books/5026-if-this-be-magic-the-unlikely-art-of-shakespeare-in-translation/

USA Publishes Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743377/if-this-be-magic-by-daniel-hahn/

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 232: 

Although ‘Coriolanus’ is officially Shakespeare’s last Roman tragedy his next play, ‘Cymbeline’, is set in the Roman period, but in England, and suggests that Shakespeare was still deeply attracted to Roman history, although in this case his plundering of Roman history was not directly from Plutarch, but another of his favourite sources.  There are some themes in ‘Cymbeline’ that you will find familiar from ‘Coriolanus’ and will encounter again in ‘The Tempest’, but once again we have a play from Shakespeare that is not quite like any other of his, despite some shared themes with the later plays.  For many Cymbeline remains an enigmatic play, or a flawed experiment, or an example of the work of a playwright growing tired with his work, and perhaps something of all of that is present in the play, but there is, I think, a good argument that Shakespeare was in fact still experimenting with form and content and responding to concerns of his time in his plays just as he always had done.

The dating of the play

The early printing of the play

‘Innogen’ Vs ‘Imogen’

The sources for the play

A summary of a complicated plot

‘Cymbeline’ as a tragicomedy

The comic character of Cloten

James 1st as represented by King Cymbeline

The historical Britain represented in the play

The nobility of the British characters in the play

Iachimo, the other Roman characters and the English attitude towards Italians

The sons of Balarius

Imogen – a great Shakespeare heroine or slightly unsatisfying?

A brief critical history of the play

The later performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

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www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. 

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Episode 231: 

Shakespeare in noted for the diversity of deaths in the plays and the way that he represents the mechanics of those deaths.  My guest for this episode has written a book on this very subject, ‘Death by Shakespeare’, who’s subtitle ‘Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts’, gives just a hint of that diversity.  In the book Kathryn Harkup casts a scientific eye over the varied and creative ways that Shakespeare’s characters die and both questions and admires the accuracy of the portrayals of death in the plays and looks at how Shakespeare’s audience would have received these events, and much more.

Kathryn Harkup is a former chemist turned writer and science communicator. Her interests are in anything gothic, gory and geeky, and preferably all three. She has written several books on the crossover between science, literature and pop culture including The Secret Lives of the Elements, The Secret Lives of Molecules, A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, Making the Monster: The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts, Superspy Science: Science, Death and Tech in the World of James Bond and Vampirology: The Science of Horror’s Most Famous Fiend. Her latest book is V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death.

I spoke to Kathryn over a zoom call

Links to ‘Death By Shakespeare’

Katherine’s Website: https://harkup.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B084RG3PXD

Publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/death-by-shakespeare-9781472958204

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Shakespeare-Snakebites-Stabbings-Broken/dp/1472958209/ref=sr_1_1

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 230:

Shakespeare probably did not realise it, but his next offering would be his last tragedy and his last Roman play, but for this one he reached back into a much earlier Rome than the world of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra that he had previously mined.  ‘Coriolanus’, the choice of the story of the legendary Caius Martius, a 5th century BC Roman general who was both fated and vilified during his political career and who was also known for his antipathy towards a hungry Roman population, might have been inspired by recent events in England.  We can’t be certain of that, but whatever the case there it is quite clearly one of Shakespeare’s most political tragedies which has become a play that perhaps more than any other in the cannon has been used to make political points, particularly when we consider productions in the last century.

The dating of the play

The play at the Blackfriars Theatre and in the First Folio

The sources for the play

A summary of the plot

Coriolanus as a political play, but not representative of his own views

The question of how power should be granted 

The character of Coriolanus

The use of language as an expression of character

The character and speech of Menenius

The character and speech of Volumina

The pivotal moment of silence in the play

The performance history of the play

A final word on the play from Willian Hazlitt

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

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You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. 

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Episode 229:

It has been long recognised that Shakespeare included a lot of sex references in his plays, many of which are now quite obscure to the modern viewer.  Recently a book called ‘Shakespeare on Sex’ caught my eye and I had an entertaining time reading it and thinking on the different perspective it offers on Shakespeare when seen through the lens of how Shakespeare thought about sex for his plays.

I was very pleased when author Marc Berley agreed to come on the podcast to discuss the book, although it did throw up a question immediately about how we could speak frankly about this subject on the podcast.  As you will hear we were still struggling a bit with that question as we spoke.  I hope we got the balance right, but be warned we talk about the language and mechanics of sex as they appear in the plays and hence I have marked this episode up as ‘explicit’.

Marc Berley was professor of English at Rutgers and Barnard/Columbia. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Threepenny Review, Lit Hub, and newspapers nationwide. He has appeared on BBC and PBS and been covered by Reuters, USA Today, the Washington Post, and ABC’s The View. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia. The author of ‘After the Heavenly Tune’ and editor of ‘Reading the Renaissance’, he is founding editor of the award-winning literary magazine LitMag. He lives in New York.

Find out more about Marc and his work at: https://marcberley.com/

Amazon UK link to 'Shakespeare on Sex: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Sex-Wills-Shaped-Liberated/dp/1510786465

Amazon US link to 'Shakespeare on Sex': https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Sex-Wills-Shaped-Liberated/dp/1510786465

Publishers website link: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510786462/shakespeare-on-sex/

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 228:

About the same time that Shakespeare was retelling the story of Pericles Ben Jonson was writing ‘Epicene, or the Silent Woman’, a play set very firmly in his home turf of London.  It had been three years since Jonson had written for the public stage, which is not to say that his last play ‘Volpone’ was not a success, but he was occupied with producing masques for the King and the court, working with Inigo Jones, which a much more profitable endeavour for him personally than another satire for the public to judge.  In those three years he produced seven court entertainments, so he was far from idle. Whatever the case ‘Epicene’ is another Jonson play that had a tricky start in life, although on the scale of some of his previous issues with the law and failures on the stage he probably did not feel too bad about this one.

Dating and the first performances of the play

The Whitefriars Theatre

The sources for the play

The publication history of the play

A synopsis of the plot

The first reception of ‘Epicene’

Lady Arabella Stuart’s complaint

The location of the Whitefriars Theatre

The two prologues to the play

Jonson’s attitude to gender roles

The Strand and the new West End

The noise of the city

The character of Morose

The supporting characters

Women, clothes, and the artifice of their appearance

Captain and mistress Otter

The final reveal in the play

Religious references in the play

When Jonson brings himself into the text

The performance history of the play and its influences

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.