PODCAST · arts
Shakespeare Unlimited
by Folger Shakespeare Library
When British radio listeners voted William Shakespeare their "British Person of the Millennium," the honor was entirely understandable. Shakespeare and his works are woven throughout not only English-speaking culture, but global culture. As you'll hear in this series of podcasts, Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places--not just literature and the stage, but science and social history as well. Join us for this "no limits" podcast tour of the fascinating and varied connections between Shakespeare, his works, and the world around us.
Episodes
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The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn
Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey the rhythm and spirit of Shakespeare’s words in a language that follows...
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The Improvised Shakespeare Company
What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that’s never been written—and will never be performed again? The Improvised Shakespeare Company is a long-running ensemble that performs entirely unscripted plays in the style of Shakespeare. Founded in Chicago in 2005, the company has spent two…
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Joe Papp and Shakespeare in the Park
Joe Papp was responsible for some of modern American theater's most iconic institutions: New York City's free Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater. The whole idea of "Off-Broadway." We spoke with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan about Papp's life and work, from his hardscrabble...
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Still Dreaming: Shakespeare with Seniors
In 2011, Ben Steinfeld and Noah Brody, co-directors of New York’s Fiasco Theater, were invited to an assisted living facility and nursing home just outside New York City to work with its residents on a production of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Because it was The Lillian Booth Actors Home—a...
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Elizabeth Norton: The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women
What did everyday life look like for women throughout Tudor society? A new social history, "The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton," introduces us not only to the restrictions, but also to some of the surprising freedoms that touched these women’s lives. Hear the stories of…
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Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's Tyrants
“How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? That’s a deeply unsettling question that Shakespeare grappled with again and again.” Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, "Tyrant," explores tyranny in Shakespeare’s plays. In the 100th episode of Shakespeare Unlimited, we talk...
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Antioch Shakespeare Festival: John Lithgow, Robin Lithgow, and Tony Dallas
Over the course of three summers in the 1950s, Arthur Lithgow, Meredith Dallas, and a troupe of actors they’d gathered performed every single one of Shakespeare plays, in rep, at the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, also known as Shakespeare Under the Stars, at Antioch College in Yellow Springs…
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Paterson Joseph: Julius Caesar and Me
In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, "Julius Caesar," set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, recently wrote a book about the experience called "Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s…
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Stephen Alford: London's Triumph
London in the time of William Shakespeare was a city in the midst of a phenomenal metamorphosis. During the course of Shakespeare’s professional life, the city experienced a meteoric transition, rocketing from the capital of the hinterlands to a cosmopolitan city on its way to becoming the…
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Astor Place Riot
Nearly 30 people were killed in May 1849 when fans of American actor Edwin Forrest rioted inside and outside New York’s Astor Place Opera House during a performance by Forrest’s rival, the British actor William Charles Macready. Barbara Bogaev interviews Heather Nathans and Karl Kippola about the...
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How Shakespeare Changed My Life
Hear Sir Ben Kingsley, Earle Hyman, Liev Schreiber, James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach, Estelle Parsons, and others open up about their experiences with Shakespeare’s plays. Actor/director Melinda Hall interviewed these actors (and others), as well as writers, directors, linguists, and even a…
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Antony Sher
Antony Sher talks about his experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company and his roles as Lear in 2016, Falstaff in 2013, and Richard III in 1984. In preparing for these roles, Sher kept meticulous diaries, which he later published as books— "Year of the King" for Richard, "Year of the Fat...
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Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter on the George North Manuscript
Independent scholar Dennis McCarthy and Lafayette College English professor June Schlueter say they have discovered a major new source for Shakespeare’s Richard III, Henry V, Henry VI, Part II, and at least eight other plays. The scholarly world continues to investigate and debate these new…
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Derek Jacobi: Acting Shakespeare
Actor Derek Jacobi talks about his remarkable career, including advice he received from Richard Burton, a disappointing rejection by the Royal Shakespeare Company, sharing the stage with Laurence Olivier, performing King Lear in 2010, his collaborations with Kenneth Branagh, and a struggle with...
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Derek Jacobi: Playing Hamlet
Renowned actor Derek Jacobi talks about the Shakespearean role for which he is best known, Hamlet. Beginning at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1957, Jacobi has acted this role on stage nearly 400 times, and as you can imagine, he’s devoted hours to thinking about Hamlet’s words, Hamlet’s motivations…
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Bernard Cornwell: Fools and Mortals
Bernard Cornwell, a bestselling writer of historical fiction such as the Sharpe series, has turned to the world of the Elizabethan theater. His newest novel, Fools and Mortals, is a tale of love, intrigue, opulence, and violence, all narrated by William Shakespeare’s brother Richard. Bernard...
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Orson Welles
Orson Welles is perhaps most famous for his panic-inducing radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds and the award-winning film Citizen Kane. For his entire life though, Welles's obsession was Shakespeare. He produced and starred in Shakespeare plays on Broadway and directed and starred in…
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Marketing Shakespeare
Getting audiences interested in Romeo and Juliet might be easy. But what about those more unfamiliar Shakespeare plays? Here’s an insider’s take on marketing and promotion at America’s Shakespeare festivals and theaters. Our guests are Katie Perkowski, Director of Marketing at the Alabama...
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Sights, Sounds, and Smells of Elizabethan Theater
Sixteenth-century theater companies used a variety of physical and sensual staging effects in their productions to create a full-body experience for playgoers: fireworks hissing and shooting across the stage, fake blood, fake body parts, the smell of blood and death, and more. Farah Karim-Cooper...
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Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare in China
In 2015, on a state visit to Great Britain, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping called 17th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu the “Shakespeare of the East,” and ever since, the Ministry of Culture for the People’s Republic has made a concerted push to elevate Tang to the status of Shakespeare. This...
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Shakespeare and Science Fiction
Shakespeare and his plays crop up in science fiction in a number of surprising places, from classic stories like Isaac Asimov’s “The Immortal Bard” to TV shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who. And it’s not just these more recent works: a production of Macbeth figures in Mary Shelley’s...
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Edward St. Aubyn on Dunbar
The author of the Patrick Melrose novels talks about adapting the story of one of Shakespeare’s most dysfunctional families for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. In Edward St. Aubyn’s version of “King Lear,” called “Dunbar,” Lear becomes a media mogul whose evil daughters have locked him away in a...
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Shakespeare in Swahililand
Two literary scholars discuss Shakespeare’s influence on the politics, history, and literary culture of East Africa. Edward Wilson-Lee, the son of white wildlife conservationists, spent his childhood in Kenya and now teaches Shakespeare at the University of Cambridge in England. Over the past few...
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Barry Edelstein: Thinking Shakespeare
How do actors breathe life into Shakespeare’s texts? How do they take language that’s centuries old and make it sound so real and immediate? Barry Edelstein, the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director at The Old Globe in San Diego, is one of the nation’s most experienced Shakespeare directors. Join...
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Shakespeare and War
In his one-man show "Cry Havoc!" actor Stephan Wolfert, a US Army veteran, draws together lines in Shakespeare’s plays spoken by soldiers and former soldiers—including Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. He puts those words to the task of explaining the toll that soldiering and war can take on the...
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Bernstein, Shakespeare, and West Side Story
Next year, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth. To honor him, we’re taking a look at the creation of "West Side Story," Bernstein’s most significant contribution to the world of Shakespeare. To help us out, we’ve invited in two guests with extensive knowledge. Mark…
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Shakespeare's Kitchen
How and what did the Elizabethans eat? The kitchens of Shakespeare’s time looked very different from our kitchens today, and that’s not all that has changed when it comes to habits of diet, food preparation, and especially, the way food is served. In this episode, noted food historian Francine...
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Akala and Hip-Hop Shakespeare
“Is it Shakespeare, or is it hip-hop?” British poet, rapper, and educator Kingslee James Daley, who goes by the stage name Akala, likes to recite a passage and then challenge his audience with this question. Since 2009, under the auspices of his “Hip-hop Shakespeare Company,” Akala has been going...
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Creating TNT's ‘Will:’ Craig Pearce and Shekhar Kapur
'Will,' the new series on TNT, tells stories derived from what we often call Shakespeare’s “lost years”—the time before he made a name for himself as a writer. The series takes advantage of that gaping hole in Shakespeare’s biography to weave an intricate and exciting tale of art, strife, death,...
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Phyllida Lloyd and All-Female Shakespeare
In 2012, the Donmar Warehouse presented an all-female production of "Julius Caesar," directed by Tony Award nominated director Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter. The production was set in a womens' prison, and was the first of a trilogy of all-female productions that the Guardian would...
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RSC's Digital Tempest
Twenty-first-century wizardry meets the seventeenth-century kind in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of "The Tempest" with digital effects created by The Imaginarium, a performance-capture company that’s best known for movie and video game animations. RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and...
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Tracy Chevalier: New Boy
Tracy Chevalier, author of "Girl With a Pearl Earring," takes on the tragedy of "Othello" in her latest novel, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series. But in a twist, she moves the action to a public elementary school playground in Washington, DC, in the early 1970s. The book, titled "New Boy,"...
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The Globe to Globe Hamlet Tour
In 2014, Shakespeare’s Globe in London sent a group of actors on a two-year tour to perform "Hamlet" all around the world. They finished on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, after having traveled 193,000 miles and performed in 197 countries. Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe’s...
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Adapting Shakespeare
What exactly counts as a Shakespeare adaptation? And why bother in the first place? In this podcast episode, we talk with three writers who have wrestled with these questions. Craig Wright is a TV writer and showrunner whose play, Melissa Arctic, a retelling of "The Winter’s Tale" set in rural...
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Shakespeare 400 Chicago
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, Chicago mobilized the city’s cultural and administrative resources in an unprecedented way. Barbara Gaines, founder and Artistic Director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, reflects on the "Shakespeare 400 Chicago" anniversary...
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The Book of Will
Shakespeare is famous today thanks in no small part to two members of his acting company, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who published a collection of his plays seven years after his death. Lauren Gunderson has written a new play called "The Book of Will" that portrays Heminge and Condell, along...
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How 'King Lear' Inspired 'Empire'
You can find Shakespeare in all sorts of places, including the Fox TV series "Empire." From its very beginning, "Empire" has fashioned itself on the plot of "King Lear." And that's not the only Shakespeare connection to the program, as Ilene Chaiken, showrunner and executive producer for…
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Something Rotten
In 2015, a new musical called "Something Rotten!" opened on Broadway. The plot: Two brothers living in England in 1595 have had their playwriting careers upended by the arrival of a new guy from Stratford upon Avon. Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick, brothers who co-wrote the music and lyrics for...
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Shakespeare and Marlowe
A few months ago, Oxford University Press decided that in the New Oxford Shakespeare, the plays Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 would no longer be listed as having been written by Shakespeare alone. Instead the title pages will say: “By William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.” To discuss how…
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Juliet's Answer
Starting in the 1930s, people began sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy—addressed to Juliet. In 2014, a lovelorn Canadian high school teacher traveled to Verona over summer vacation to volunteer as one of “Juliet’s secretaries.” The experience changed his…
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Shakespeare in California
When we think of Shakespeare in the American West, Hollywood immediately comes to mind, but this podcast also takes us back to the California Gold Rush and the Americans who brought Shakespeare with them when they flooded westward. Stephen Dickey, a senior lecturer in the English Department at…
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Q Brothers
Since 2002, Gregory and Jeffery Ameen Qaiyum, better known as G.Q. and J.A.Q – the Q Brothers – have been using hip-hop to adapt and update the plays of William Shakespeare. At the time we recorded this podcast, their show Othello: The Remix was running off-Broadway at the Westside Theater. They...
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Uncovering Shakespeare's House
Since 2002, a major organization in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has supported an archaeological dig on the former grounds of a house called “New Place.” New Place was one of the biggest houses in Stratford when Shakespeare was a boy. Once he became a wealthy and famous...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
When British radio listeners voted William Shakespeare their "British Person of the Millennium," the honor was entirely understandable. Shakespeare and his works are woven throughout not only English-speaking culture, but global culture. As you'll hear in this series of podcasts, Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places--not just literature and the stage, but science and social history as well. Join us for this "no limits" podcast tour of the fascinating and varied connections between Shakespeare, his works, and the world around us.
HOSTED BY
Folger Shakespeare Library
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Shakespeare Unlimited have?
Shakespeare Unlimited currently has 103 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Shakespeare Unlimited about?
When British radio listeners voted William Shakespeare their "British Person of the Millennium," the honor was entirely understandable. Shakespeare and his works are woven throughout not only English-speaking culture, but global culture. As you'll hear in this series of podcasts, Shakespeare turns...
How often does Shakespeare Unlimited release new episodes?
Shakespeare Unlimited publishes regularly with 103 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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Shakespeare Unlimited is created and hosted by Folger Shakespeare Library.
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