The History Of European Theatre

Episode 175:

On today’s guest episode we welcome Andrea Smith to the podcast.  Andrea’s book ‘Shakespeare on the Radio’ has just been published and she kindly agreed to come on and give us some highlights from her very detailed review of Shakespeare on BBC radio in the last one hundred years.

Andrea Smith is a lecturer at the University of Suffolk, specialising in Shakespeare and audio drama.  Her research looks at how stage plays can be turned into something purely aural through voice, music, sound effects and other non-verbal noises.

Link to amazon UK site: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Radio-Century-BBC-Plays/dp/1399547283/ref=sr_1_1?

Link to Edinburgh University Press site:

 https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-shakespeare-on-the-radio.html

Link to BBC Sounds Drama on 3 page:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b006tnwj

Link to Box of Broadcasts landing page:

https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bob/

Link to the online appendix listing all BBC Shakespeare productions up to 2024, which is listed in the ‘resources’ tab towards the bottom of the page:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-shakespeare-on-the-radio.html

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 174:

Ben Jonson's erliest play. Here we have the bricklayer’s son trying to make his way in the theatre and with the court.  Until James came to the throne, he was pretty unsuccessful in the latter and as far as we can tell more of less from the off his life writing for the public theatre was controversial.  I recounted the events surrounding Johnson and Nashe’s play ‘The Isle of Dogs’ as part of Jonson’s life story and ‘The Case Is Altered’ probably pre-dates those events.  What we can be sure of is that by 1597, the most likely date for ‘The Case Is Altered’ Jonson was working for Pembroke’s Men and that they probably performed the play in May or June that year.

The complications of the printing history of the play

The origins of the title

Jonson borrows from Plautus to create a romantic comedy

The satire of Anthony Munday

A brief summary of both strands of the plot

The structural issues with the play and purely comic scenes

The theory of the Humors

The character of Count Ferneze

The character of Jacques the miser

The concealment of the gold

The slight characters of the three female roles

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 173:

For this guest episode it is a very welcome return for Eleanor Conlon, who you will remember discussed Titus Andronicus with me in Episode 22 of this season.  Having picked over the brutal actions of that play with Eleanor I was pleased to hear that she was interested in a return visit and to discuss the very different piece that is Love’s Labour’s Lost.  As you will her Eleanor has a great love of this play and brings all the enthusiasm about it to our conversation that you as might expect.  If you have not already done so I would recommend listening to my previous episode on Love’s Labour’s Lost before starting on this one, which adds a lot to what I said in that episode.

Eleanor Conlon is an actor, director, and award-winning writer based in Sussex.

After completing her BA in English Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, Eleanor earned her MA in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at Kings College and Shakespeare’s Globe. While at The Globe, Eleanor worked dramaturgically on productions by Dominic Dromgoole, Matthew Dunster, and Jeremy Herrin, and with Jenny Tiramani on the Original Practices Costume Archive.

As an academic, her research focused on Renaissance Magic, Gender and Culture in Early Modern London, though for more than a decade her career has been less theoretical and more practical.  After achieving success with her theatre company ‘The Barefoot Players’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s, with which she produced plays including ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, ‘Doctor Faustus’ and ‘The Alchemist’, the latter two of which she also directed, as well as productions of several of Shakespeare’s works, plays by Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and others.  She founded her current theatre company ‘Rust & Stardust’ where working with her puppet-maker partner Katie Sommers Eleanor has written over a dozen plays rooted in English folklore and toured these shows all over the UK.

In addition to all this, and as you are about to hear, in 2023 she launched the Three Ravens Podcast with her partner Martin Vaux – also a writer and actor – which explores history, legends, and diverse aspects of folk culture.

Link to Three Ravens Podcast website: www.threeravenspodcast.com

For the Three Ravens Folktales Book:

Link to Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Ravens-Folk-Tales-half-forgotten/dp/1803999683

Link To Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Ravens-Folk-Tales-half-forgotten-ebook/dp/B0CW1GB63M/ref=sr_1_1

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 172:

The dating of the play

The early publication history of the play

The sources for the play

A synopsis of the play

A play that explores language and it’s limits

The opening scene

Constable Dull

The central ‘reveal’ scene and it’s poetry

The character and behaviour of Costard

The longest word in the Shakespeare cannon

The pageant of the nine worthies

The character of Jacquenetta

Shakespeare’s parody and homage to previous literary forms

The meaning of the title of the play

The concept of ‘the academy’ and comparisons with Elizabeth’s court

The critical reception of the play

The performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 171: 

For today’s guest episode it is a warm welcome to Stephen Watkins who is going to take us a little way forward in the timeline to the world of Restoration England where after fourteen years of closures theatres were again legally opened and where, as we shall hear, performance of Shakespeare plays formed a significant part of the repertoire, and this discussion does focus very much on Shakespeare in the Restoration, we will, of course, get to a look at the other playwrights and players of that period all in good time.

Stephen Watkins is a writer and researcher working mainly on Shakespeare and Early Modern literature, with a particular focus on how writers and theatre makers recycle, adapt and remediate source texts to both register and resist historical and cultural change.  He has published widely on Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and the important figure of that time, William Davenant.  His book ‘Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory’, as part of the Cambridge University Press, ‘Elements in Shakespeare Performance’ series was published in February 2025. In it Stephen demonstrates how Davenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare were shaped as much by the transformed commercial and repertorial logics that came to govern the patent companies in the 1660s as they were by shifting aesthetic and political concerns in the period. Stephen has taught English at the Universities of Oxford, Nottingham, and Derby, and is currently based at the University of Greenwich.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Restoration-Repertory-Elements-Performance/dp/1009324136/ref=sr_1_1?

https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Restoration-Repertory-Elements-Performance-ebook/dp/B0F29S1NJ1/ref=sr_1_1?

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 170: 

The dating of the play

The tradition of the queen Elizabeth commission

The tradition of the connection to the Garter Ceremony

The Question of who played Falstaff

A summary of the plot

The early publication history of the play in short quarto editions

The sources for the play

The very specific location of the play

The character of Falstaff

The way the dominating prose of the play is used to define characters

The change in Mistress Quickly and her use of language

The stereotypical comedy of foreigners in Dr Caius and Parson Evans

Was the play written for one audience, but then changed to fit another?

The play as a city comedy and how Shakespeare subverts the genre

The influence of Queen Elizabeth’s position as a female ruler on the play

The later performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 169

A welcome return for Kyle Thomas to the podcast where we discussed Kyle’s work on preparing three of the York Cycle plays for performance this summer in Toronto.  As you will hear Kyle is part of a team that are going to perform the fifty-play cycle on the 7th June 2025 in the grounds of the University of Toronto.

Link to the York Cycle Plays performed at Toronto University in June 2025: https://www.yorkplays.ca

Link to Kyle’s projects:

Ensemble Member: Stage Left Theatre

Reviewer for ChicagoOnStage.com

Chief Editor of ROMARD: Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama

Featured Expert on Mysteries of the Abandoned: Hidden America (Discovery Channel)

Lead Author of The Play About the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation

Link to my blog post about the Valenciennes Illustration https://www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com/blog/the-stage-set-from-valenciennes-1547/

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

Episode 168:

Although Shakespeare's completion of the events of Henry IV’s reign is very much a continuation of the story from part one it is a play with a very different vibe.  The vigour of the battle scenes and the exuberance of prince Hal and Falstaff’s relationship are replaced in part two with a more sombre and elegiac tone.  The effects of old age and the passing to time hang over the play and even at its ending, where the coronation of Henry V could have been treated as a big party full of hope, it is the final rejection of Falstaff that dominates as once again Shakespeare provides an ending that many would have found surprising.

The dating of the play

The early publishing history of the play

The early performance history of the play

Shakespeare’s sources for the play

A Synopsis of the plot

How the play functions without much dramatic action

Was the play a hurriedly written sequel?

Foreshadowing and references to history

The presence of the king and his illness in the play

The nature of the comedy in the play

The final split with Falstaff

Falstaff the dangerous conman

The Justices Shallow and Silence

Mistress Quickly and the other comic characters

The Epilogue

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 167

A conversation with Kyle Thomas where we discussed the long transition period between Roman theatre and medieval theatre.  As you may remember from my episodes on the medieval theatre this is a very opaque period where details are few and far between.  In my episodes in season three of the podcast I mostly followed the view that medieval theatre grew out of parts of the church liturgy that became dramatized as very simple, short plays.  As you will hear in our conversation Kyle puts a more nuanced perspective on that and also speaks to the role of the education system of the time in that process.

Links to Kyle’s projects:

Ensemble Member: Stage Left Theatre

Reviewer for ChicagoOnStage.com

Chief Editor of ROMARD: Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama

Featured Expert on Mysteries of the Abandoned: Hidden America (Discovery Channel)

Lead Author of The Play About the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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

Episode 166:

As with 'Richard II' 'Henry IV part 1' handles some complex English history as it examines the relationships between the King, his son and the powerful Percy family.  After the deposition of Richard II Henry ruled for fourteen years until his death. Having ended 'Richard II' with Henry’s accession to the throne and Richard’s death in prison Shakespeare opens this play just a few years later, but with a vision of a tired king and a country dissatisfied with his rule.  

The setting for the play

A brief synopsis of the play

The dating of the play

The early performance history of the play

The publication history of the play

The sources for the play

The balance of history and comedy

The historical accuracy of the play

The play as an examination of the father/son relationship

The character of Hotspur as a medieval knight

The portrayal of Glendower as a mystic leader

The role of the aristocratic ladies

Prince Hal as a new sort of leader

Falstaff, ruler of his own sort of court and a king of everyman

The historical figure of Sir John Oldcastle

The later performance history of the play

Support the podcast at:

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com

www.patreon.com/thoetp

www.ko-fi.com/thoetp

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