The Spectral Summit

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, we examine a few key Shakespearean pieces that the legendary actor Edwin Booth performed in the 1860s and beyond. He has the distinction of performing Hamlet more than any other actor in history, including 100 Nights of Hamlet, which he performed just a few months before the assassination. We explore the following pieces:

• Richard III - Now is the winter of our discontent soliloquy - Act 1, Sc. 1
• Julius Caesar - Antony's funeral oration - Act 3, Sc. 2
• Hamlet - "To Be or not to be" soliloquy and "Get thee to a nunnery" scene - Act 3, Sc. 1
• Hamlet - Advice to Actors - Act 3 - Sc. 2
• As You Like It - All the World's a Stage - Act II, Sc. 7

You can hear Max Grimm giving justice to these pieces, and you can hear Kelley Cody-Grimm as Ophelia in Hamlet.  We get an overview of what sort of works Edwin and John Wilkes Booth did of Shakespeare. Enjoy!

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this essay, the second to the last before teen Ben Franklin was found out as the true writer of the Silence Dogood essays by his brother James who published the New England Courant, young Ben examines Boston's night life. In contrast to modern interpretations of the Puritans, Franklin tells us about how teens would hang out, use their own slang and wear out their shoes, much to the delight of the shoemakers. It shows that human behavior has not really changed in 300 years and that the need to connect outside of traditional roles is still as strong as ever. 

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

In her twelfth letter to the New-England Courant (September 1722), the widow Silence Dogood turns her sharp wit to a subject as old as taverns themselves: what happens to a man once he's had a bit too much to drink. With her signature blend of humor and observation, Silence notes how a shy man can suddenly find his tongue after a glass or two — and how quickly that borrowed cleverness turns him into the fool of the room once the sober onlookers start to notice.

What makes this letter especially remarkable is who wrote it: a 16-year-old Benjamin Franklin, secretly slipping these essays under the door of his brother's print shop under a woman's name. Join us as Silence walks through the brief, false shine drink gives a man — and the much longer shadow it leaves behind.

Perfect for listeners curious about colonial life, satire, and the surprisingly sharp teenage mind behind one of early America's most famous literary disguises.

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

This satirical essay tackles the social and financial anxieties of aging unmarried women. Silence Dogood shares a letter from a fictional petitioner named Margaret Aftercast. Margaret reflects on her youth, admitting that she was vanity-driven and routinely rejected worthy suitors simply because she enjoyed having a crowd of admirers. Now facing old age alone, she expresses deep regret for her youthful arrogance and asks Silence to help design a relief fund for single women who find themselves in similar circumstances.

In response, Silence lightheartedly proposes an "insurance" or mutual-aid society. Under this project, any woman who remains single past a certain age would receive a massive cash payout of £500 to secure her financial independence. 

Through this playful proposal, 16-year-old Ben Franklin uses his female alter-ego to poke fun at youthful pride while addressing the very real economic vulnerabilities of unmarried women in colonial America.

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

In her tenth letter to the New England Courant, Silence Dogood turns her sharp eye to a problem colonial society preferred not to discuss: what happens to a woman when her husband dies and takes the family's security with him. Her proposal — a fund women could pay into during marriage, to protect against poverty in widowhood — was a strikingly modern idea for 1722. What her readers didn't know was that "Silence" wasn't a widow at all, but the pen name of sixteen-year-old apprentice Benjamin Franklin. Join us as we explore this early glimpse of financial foresight, hidden identity, and a teenage boy's surprisingly progressive take on women's economic security.

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

Benjamin Franklin published fourteen Silence Dogood essays in the New-England Courant in 1722, slipping them under the print shop door so his brother James wouldn't know who wrote them. It's the first case of a founding father not only trolling his brother but also catfishing when James developed an affection for Silence. 

 By Essay Nine, Silence had found her footing — and her targets. This one aims at a particular Boston type: the man who wraps himself in religion just long enough to get elected, then sets it aside like a Sunday coat.

Franklin was sixteen years old when he wrote it, and he already understood that the loudest piety in the room is often the least trustworthy. 

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

Join us as we explore the wit and dark humor of Dorothy Parker who is best remembered for her razor wit. "A Telephone Call" which originally appeared in the January 1928 issue of The Bookman, is one of her most psychologically raw interior monologues — strips away the wit entirely, leaving a woman in agony over a phone that won't ring. It's Parker at her most unguarded: funny and excruciating at the same time, a masterclass in the way we negotiate with ourselves when we're powerless, so yeah, we’ve all been there. 

So sit back and enjoy the universal Truth of A Telephone Call. 

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

Welcome to our exploration of The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, and Annabel Lee — three of Edgar Allan Poe’s most haunting and enduring works.  In this episode, Kelley discusses the meaning while Max reads three of Poe's classics. 

In these pieces, Poe invites us to travel through the darker corners of the human mind. The Raven captures the torment of grief and obsession, as a mysterious bird becomes the voice of loss that cannot be silenced. The Tell-Tale Heart plunges into the mind of a narrator who insists on his sanity even as guilt drives him toward confession. Annabel Lee mourns a love so pure and powerful that even death cannot destroy it.

Together, these works reveal Poe’s fascination with love and loss, beauty and death, sanity and madness. He believed that great art could emerge from sorrow — that beauty and melancholy are inseparable. Through his rhythmic language, vivid imagery, and hypnotic repetition, Poe created stories and poems that feel both musical and psychological, blending emotion and intellect in ways that still unsettle readers today.

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this essay, teen Ben Franklin addresses the importance of Freedom of Speech after his brother James is arrested by the authorities in New England for "Publishing too freely." While his brother is in jail, Ben the apprentice, who was not allowed to publish under his own name, uses his outrage as Silence Dogood to reference an article in the London Journal that addresses what would become our First Amendment.

It's a bold essay from a London publication that calls out suppressing a person's right to express freely in 1722. At the end of the essay, we offer some thought-provoking questions about the freedom of expression. 

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this essay, in which Teen Ben Franklin trolls his brother James, Silence Dogood  features a real poem (An Elegy upon the much Lamented Death of Mrs. Mehitable Kitel) and dryly praises it as "the most Extraordinary Piece that ever was written in New-England."

Ben Franklin then famously includes a satirical recipe for writing a terrible colonial elegy. He instructs readers to take a person's virtues, mix in a handful of melancholy words (like dreadful or cruel cold death), and "put them into the empty Scull of some young Harvard student to finish the job. It's another example of young Ben's satiric wit. 

Learn more about The Spectral and Literary Summit at our website - www.spectral-summit.com.  We offer historic and literary videos and podcasts that make the past and literature come alive.  This is a production of Creative Actors Lab . Check out our Instagram page here.