Mary Zimmerman

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 235

When Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was on Broadway in 2002, it won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel awards for best play. Zimmerman took home the Tony award for best director. This spring, director Psalmayene 24 and an all-Black cast stage a new production of the play interpreted through the lens of the African diaspora.

Zimmerman joins us on the podcast to talk about the process of adapting Metamorphoses and The Odyssey, directing Shakespeare, and more. She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Beyond Metamorphoses, Zimmerman has adapted other ancient texts for the stage, like The Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, and Journey to the West. She has directed many of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as operas at the Metropolitan Opera. She co-wrote the libretto for the Phillip Glass opera Galileo Galilei. The Matchbox Magic Flute, her new adaptation of Mozart, plays at DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company this month, in association with the Goodman Theatre.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 7, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Kendra Hanna. 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 from Northwestern University and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Previous: Judi Dench on Seven Decades of Shakespeare, with Brendan O’Hea

MICHAEL WITMORE: On today’s episode, the playwright and director Mary Zimmerman explores the fantastical—and the funny—in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Michael Witmore, the Folger director.

Mary Zimmerman’s play, Metamorphoses, retells stories from Ovid—like King Midas, Orpheus and Eurydice, Eros and Psyche—in vibrant, contemporary language and settings. The result is an evening of theater that reminds us of the timelessness of myth and its emphasis on universal themes like love, grief, and desire.

In its 2002 Broadway production, the play won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel awards for best play. Zimmerman took home the Tony award for best director.

Since first staging it in the mid-1990s, Zimmerman used a pool of water as a central feature of the set—characters wash, play, drown, enter, and exit the action through the water.

A new production of Metamorphoses at the Folger Theatre opening May 7th reimagines the play’s staging—this time, without the pool. Director Psalmayene 24 will lead an all-Black cast in interpreting the play through the lens of the African diaspora.

Beyond Metamorphoses, Zimmerman has adapted other ancient texts for the stage, like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, and has directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s as well as operas, at the Metropolitan Opera, and co-wrote the libretto for the Phillip Glass opera Galileo Galilei.

Here is Mary Zimmerman, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARABARA BOGAEV: You’ve often talked about your approach as a kind of archeology in rehearsals. What do you mean by that?

MARY ZIMMERMAN: Where that term comes from for me is that I feel like creative process is sometimes described in kind of architectural terms. Like we’re building something. As though we’re starting from, like, a flat line on the ground, and then we’re like pulling something up into a shape. We’re building something.

But I sort of feel that it’s a, kind of, finding something that already exists, like an archaeological artifact under—buried under the ground. And that the process of rehearsal is a process of uncovering that. And if you rush, you will damage the thing. And if you don’t work hard enough, you will arrive on opening night with dirt still all over it.

But I also feel that in the digging itself, you’re actually making the object. But what I mean by “it’s there already” is… I guess I just feel that, like, if you’re really attuned to what you’re doing, the thing has a kind of inevitability about it. You feel like you’re discovering day by day, and you are.

But your character, the character of the people in the room with you, the story you’re working on, its will to power—which I sort of believe in, of  old stories—they have a kind of inevitable conclusion.

BOGAEV: It almost sounds as if you’re looking for or you’re digging out, you’re unearthing that thing that exists in the air between you, all your cast, and your crew and you.

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. Or, you know sculptors—I think Michelangelo said the statue is already in the stone. You’re just chipping away what’s not the statue.

You know when you’re really working well in rehearsal, or on anything creative, I think, you do have that feeling like you are… it’s just coming through you, and your job is to get out of the way. Part of that is—explains how I work, which is, you know, I don’t write things in advance. Metamorphoses was written that way as well.

It was written during the timeframe of rehearsal. I don’t mean in rehearsal. I mean, in the hours in between rehearsal. You know, every night I go home and I sort of write a day ahead. I’m not a day behind. They’re not improvising. Then I write it down. I’m, like, building off of the day and then writing the script for the next day, one day ahead.

BOGAEV: Okay, that’s so wild. I mean, when and why did you start doing this? And does it involve—you need that pressure?

ZIMMERMAN: I do need that pressure. That pressure pushes you towards the unconscious. It pushes away self-consciousness. There’s a kind of urgency, and it’s like, “Just try this. Let’s just do this.” And, you know, later on, refinement and so forth comes in. But yeah, that pressure and getting yourself out of the way so you don’t have time to plan and strategize and think twice about it.

Look, this method is also dependent on the fact that I’m adapting, right? I’m not writing a made-up story out of the blue that I have to know the—that I have to figure out the plot of and make sure that we’re on the right path to that plot.

These—you know, this is always used…. I use this method always when there’s a source text, right? So, really what I’m doing is just getting it from one form into another. But there is that source text that I’m working off of, so it’s not a complete leap into nothingness.

BOGAEV: Well, one of the things that’s different about this production at the Folger is the director, [Psalmayene 24], has decided not to use what is a signature of Metamorphoses: a big pool of water. Just water on the stage. He’s not going to go that way. How do you feel about that?

ZIMMERMAN: The play has often been done by people without water, using other natural elements or fabric, or all kinds of things. It’s—and sometimes there’s water, but it’s just a nod to it. Like very small little pool or something like that. So, it’s not unprecedented to not have the water.

The idea of the water came with the idea of doing the myths. It wasn’t, “I want to do some myths. Hmm, how shall I do them? Think, think, think.” It was, “I want to do myths in water.” That was the original impulse.

That said, it is absolutely true that the show—and this always surprises me—is still really, really moving in the rehearsal room when there’s no water. You know, I’ve been in the rehearsal room a million times with this show. It still is beautiful.

But, you know, the myths were somewhat chosen because, for the most part, they could use the water, or that the water was acting metaphorically, or they took place in literal water. You know, that the water was resonant somehow with the story.

That’s how I sort of, for a—not all of them—but that was a kind of governing impulse of which myths got included.

BOGAEV: Right. And you said you started, it came to you when you were working on The Odyssey, even though you ended up doing The Odyssey on land.

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I’d actually already done The Odyssey, but I wanted to do it in school. I wanted… I was going to do it professionally. I really wanted to do it in water. And then, that production got kind of postponed unexpectedly, and I was still at school. And I thought, “Well, you know what, let me try out the idea on other Greek myths. You know, let me try out that idea.” And that became Metamorphoses.

So, yes, it was. You’re absolutely right. I had thought of The Odyssey. You know, it’s such a maritime culture, the Greek world. But then for Metamorphoses, water is a symbol of change cross-culturally. And it’s in a million different idioms. You know, crossing one’s Rubicon. Going down to the river to meet the gods. You can’t put anything in water without it eventually changing, being corrupted, or we think of it as being purified. And, water itself is changeable. It can be solid and frozen, it can be liquid, or it can be steam.

BOGAEV: What was it like for you when you finally then saw the production with everything?

ZIMMERMAN: I love this question. I thought you were going to say when I finally saw it in the water. You know, I was using undergraduates at Northwestern, and we had our first rehearsal in the water one evening—It’s always evening at school—under work light, like fluorescent light, and it was so, so beautiful and so, sort of, sexy. I thought, “I’m going to get into trouble.” You know what I mean? With these undergraduates in this water. It was so, so beautiful and sensual. I remember that I didn’t really sleep that night. I was so excited.

Or, I’m eliding that with, before we opened it for the first time professionally with my theater company Lookingglass Theater Company, I just would be, like, vibrating in bed just with excitement and unable to sleep because the beauty of it under lights and so forth and so on, was so overpowering to me.

BOGAEV: I know one big breakthrough you said you had with Metamorphoses early on was adding the myth of Eros and Psyche, which isn’t in Ovid. You said it just consolidated everything.

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, Eros and Psyche It’s such a psychological myth. It’s so beautiful.

The real origin is my mother’s bookshelf in the living room that had Edith Hamilton’s mythology on it. When I was a child and then kind of finished all the fairytales, like, I couldn’t find any more fairytales. I kind of knew this was fairytale-like. And there were illustrations, and there’s a illustration of Psyche parting the curtain and looking down at Eros asleep, with the candle or the oil lamp—I can’t remember—that drips on him and wakes him. I just remember that image, like, really strongly.

Then the way traditionally we’ve staged that is, although we’re telling the entire story of Eros and Psyche, which is very long and has many parts and sort of adventures and tasks in it, the only image we’re seeing is Psyche creeping down some stairs with this candelabra, and into the water and up to this figure of Eros. Then him seeing her and then a kind of short resolution.

It’s like watching a photograph develop. Like we’re watching that image that is that illustration in Edith Hamilton’s mythology develop over the course of, you know, four or five minutes.

But, it does sort of consolidate the show in a way because there’s a mystery at the center of it and I don’t have the answer to that mystery. You know, Psyche is forbidden to look directly on Eros. Psyche in Greek—at least this is sort of what I’ve read—means the soul. So, why can’t the soul look directly on Eros?

I’m not sure I have the answer. After all these years with this show. After… I think I’ve directed it in 17 different places or, sometimes the same place, you know, but a remount. You know, I’ve rehearsed it 17 times and teched it 17 times. I still…there’s something unsayable in that, and yet it feels like oddly true. It’s a highly, highly romantic story as well and a sort of healing story.

BOGAEV: When you say it’s kind of ineluctable, you can’t really put it into words. Do you come up—have you, in the past come up with theories about it that have evolved?

ZIMMERMAN: No, I’m content to leave it—

BOGAEV: Mysterious.

ZIMMERMAN: You know, these myths… I really believe cultural myths of all kinds, hang around and are still with us. Because—not through some conspiracy of English teachers, right? But because they’re earning their keep in some way. They still are addressing, kind of, eternal questions.

What Metamorphoses is about at core, I think, is how life inescapably contains unwanted change. Like, forced change, out of your control, radical change. And yet, it was ever thus. That’s something that’s comforting about these myths. Like, it was ever thus. We always suffered from great change.

You know, kind of, notably, when this show moved to New York our first preview, was September 16, 2001. So, five days after September 11. We went into tech 48 hours later.

I’m here to tell you that catharsis is real, and I witnessed it. That is to say, by an audience witnessing and feeling pity and terror through representation, you know, of the self. Through representation of other people up there, you move through that into a kind of release and even ecstasy.

There are very close to the bone, very harrowing moments in this script, very close to the beginning, one of them, that I was in the theater with the sense of pressure pushing me against the back wall. Like, the pressure in the theater was so intense in that audience, because there’s only really one thought happening.

In this early story of Alcyon and Ceyx, Ceyx goes off to work on a bright sunny day and meets disaster, and as he’s sinking beneath the waves, his one prayer is, “Let my wife, my beloved, find my body.”

In New York at that time, the search for the body was ubiquitous. It was everywhere you saw live scenes of that drama as well as posters everywhere, and photographs taped up everywhere, and all the subway stations, everywhere.  You know, that eternal desire, which is a sort of maybe slightly strange one: “Let her find my body.” It was just sort of notable.

But I felt, “How can I be putting anyone through this at this moment?” But I’ve always said since then, since that experience, the most important line for me, just personally, in Metamorphoses, is when, in the final story—which is quite happy—where these poor people invite the gods in disguise into their house to have supper. You know, they’re disguised as beggars. But the poor let them into their house and they set the table with all their humble nuts and things.

They bring a basket of apples. And then the… in one translation, the narration sort of pauses and says, “Remember how apples smell.” That phrase, “Remember how apples smell,” was so beautiful to me at the time because the overwhelming rhetoric was, “Everything has changed. Every single thing about life has changed and will never be the same. We’re in a new world, a new disastrous world, and everything is different.” But that’s ignoring the natural world. That’s ignoring the world outside of human consciousness. And that has a sort of eternal quality to it. The thought that, you know, a couple thousand years ago, someone would write, “Think of how apples smell,” and you can smell that. 2,000 years later, you know, we can do that.

That’s a kind of magic, It’s a reassuring magic about some continuity in the natural world, right? And, on opening night in New York, the cast gave me—my opening night gift, was an engraved crystal bowl full of ripe apples.

BOGAEV: Let’s talk about Shakespeare, because you’ve directed a few Shakespeare plays, quite a few. One of them is full of some difficult things. Pericles, that has incest and attempted murder and rape and burial at sea and shipwreck. It makes sense to me that Pericles would be something you’d be drawn to. It’s such a watery tale, and it’s full of transformation. But what attracted you to it initially?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, Michael Kahn, you know, offered it to me. At first, I remember I, like, read it on the plane down to the meeting. I mean, that’s how sort of, like, not totally thinking about it I was.

But it is up my alley in a bunch of ways. It’s epic. You know, there’s sea journeys. Being lost at sea, lost and found between people. There’s almost, sort of, magic in it, and recovery and redemption. I did end up just falling completely in love with it.

And it has narration in the form of Gower—I kind of got rid of Gower and I kept the narration but it divided between cast members, and they passed around one of those little, tiny Shakespeare books, those little, tiny ones that have the individual plays in it, because I found the kind of rhythm of Gower appearing and talking for so long a little wearying. I kept putting it in different voices and trying to kind of activate it.

BOGAEV: What did you like about them passing around that miniature Shakespeare book?

ZIMMERMAN: I guess it’s just a kind—I hope—a kind of witty reference to the literary—you know, that it is a tale, as the original play has that. Because Gower is a sort of storyteller, a singer that is narrating this thing. I might have also partly just done it because I wanted to include the stage direction, “Enter Pirates.” It got a huge, huge laugh because they entered from a hidden door in the wall, like, a whole lot of pirates. It’s just one of those kind of funny, understated—you know, “Exit pursued by a bear”—It’s one of those funny Shakespeare little instructions.

BOGAEV: The, “Who would have thunk it,” thing. Yeah. Does Shakespeare require a different approach for you than Ovid? I mean, do you feel… I guess what I mean by that is, do you feel as free to adapt and change Shakespeare as you do with any other text?

ZIMMERMAN: No, no, no. When I do an extant text that was written as a play, I feel like I’m really conservative. I don’t do the play unless I like it. I’m not really deconstructing it. I take the happy endings of Shakespeare’s plays at face value. I don’t, you know, have dark looks all around at the end.

That’s kind of a contemporary trope of Shakespeare productions. Like, “How could she possibly marry him after all of this?” And then there’s dark looks all around at the final moment. They’re fables. There’s a fable quality to those romances.

I particularly like, you know, the problem plays. I particularly like them. I like problem texts. Like, that’s sort of what I’ve done all along, is do things that are quite, maybe kind of difficult to stage or figure out how to stage. And Shakespeare has some of those.

BOGAEV: Well, you did direct Measure for Measure for the Public Theater in New York City. It’s such a convoluted plot, really. You got kudos for adapting it gracefully and making this crystal-clear production. How did you edit it or streamline it to achieve that simplicity?

ZIMMERMAN: I may have cut a little bit. I don’t remember cutting a lot. And, by the way, my highest value in Shakespeare is clarity. I don’t want anyone to say a word that they don’t understand. Often, the actor, or yourself, could think you understand it, but you actually—you’re a bit incorrect. You’re not on the same page with your actor.

Shakespeare—rehearsing Shakespeare is exhausting. It’s more exhausting than writing every night your own play when you go home. It’s as you’re doing, you know, building your bridges or crossing it.

BOGAEV: Why?

ZIMMERMAN: Because the level of attentiveness. Like, I’m like a dog with its ears just like so forward pricked. Every moment of rehearsal, I’m listening, listening, listening. Is it clear? Is it clear? Is it natural? Does it sound like thought? Does it sound like speech? Is there any muzziness on what we’re saying here?

And a lot of that is technical. It’s not technical in terms of, like, a mellifluous, beautiful voice. I don’t like that. I don’t like the golden throat thing. But the… does it have the amount of expressiveness that normal everyday speech has? Does it have that flexibility and yet it contains that vocabulary, in that syntax, and that depth of thought, and that portrayal of character—all of it—but sounds like speech? Sounds like a person talking?

Because that’s what makes it clear to the audience, right? It’s just so beautiful. The language is so dense, but if it’s done right, it’s so clear. And then, you’ve got this poetry entering your ears and your head, and this depth of thought, so perfectly stated. So gorgeously stated, and rhythmic, and sometimes rhyming. You fill up with that.

BOGAEV: You’re an actor, or you were an actor, yourself.

ZIMMERMAN: Oh, barely.

BOGAEV: And it sounds like you had this epiphany during a performance once and you decided you’d never act again.

ZIMMERMAN: That is correct.

BOGAEV: What happened? What play was it and what went on?

ZIMMERMAN: You know, I found out later that this hurt the feelings of my beloved mentor, professor, and director of that show at Northwestern. So, apologies to my beloved Paul Edwards, because he’s chagrined that I had this epiphany during a production of his. He’s a brilliant director, and I learned everything about adaptation from him.

BOGAEV: Although it’s all about you and not him, but yeah.

ZIMMERMAN: Right. It is. But, what happened was it was an adaptation of Hard Times, the Dickens novel. It’s a scene where I think someone’s fallen down a mine shaft or well, and we’re all gathered around and worried about that or whatever.

It was just a kind of, like, very arid Sunday matinee. I was there in my little costume and braids. I was playing a young girl. And, somehow, I just felt the fraudulence of it. There was something fraudulent about it.

Again, I don’t mean to run this down when it’s done perfectly—it’s gorgeous. You know, I love naturalism. I love all that. I love it. I absolutely love it.  But myself, somehow, I had this moment on stage where I dropped out of it in a really serious way.

But, where the action is, for me, is when I started staging things in certain classes at school at Northwestern, and taking myself out of them and staging these little performance art pieces, to tell the truth, non-narrative things. And it was just so much easier to not be in them. Suddenly, like, that’s where it’s at: the composition of the whole thing, the conducting of the whole thing.

But it took me until I was, like, mid-twenties to understand what that meant. You know what I mean? Like, I just, even though I was in the theater, I didn’t understand the function of the director and what it takes, you know? And I just… it took me a while to realize, like, “Oh, it’s this other part of this. That’s the real hook. It’s the behind-the-scenes part, not the being on stage part.”

BOGAEV: I wanted to ask you about that because I watch your productions and I always think that the abhorrence of fakeness makes your work so transcendent.

One example was in a production of The Odyssey, you portray Odysseus’ slaughter of all of Penelope’s suitors, and sand just falls gently on these actors heads. You know, instead of having some big fight scene, you just have the sand coming down and the actors, they just kind of slowly lie down.

It—and I was watching this—it was like you’re saying, “We know it would just be artificial and dumb to have all these actors act out death, so let’s do this.” It was so beautiful. It reminds me of, you know, using sand and water and these elemental things to avoid that kind of fake acti-ness in these… in a way like the choreographer Pina Bausch.

ZIMMERMAN: Oh, yes. Which I’m highly influenced by. I saw Arien, which is in water, when I was younger. I saw it, so you know, that’s where that idea probably comes from.

I love that you give that example from The Odyssey. It’s the number one example I give to my students when I’m talking about the difference between the representational, which would be attempting to do a huge fight-choreographed thing with fake blood and people being stabbed—And, by the way, that chapter of The Odyssey is the longest book in the whole thing. It goes on and on in absolutely graphic and minute detail about the death of so many suitors—and to do that representationally is maybe what film would do, right? Or what you can do in your head as you’re reading. It’s all there in your head.

But, on stage, you know, I had like five suitors. And, death on stage is kind of the most—the more real you try to do it, the sort of faker it is. Because we all know this thing repeats. Like, that’s the bottom line thing we know about the theater. It happened last night, it’s happening tomorrow night. We know.

So, to do it, like, you know, presentationally, where you’re sort of presenting open-handedly this idea of death. And, yeah, they all get led under these suspended bags of sand, and then Athena pokes those bags of sand with her long spear. It’s like 12 feet long, and then this cascade of sand starts coming down. It becomes—it can become many, many things. They’re all under a spotlight, and that trail of sand is like sand through the hourglass. It’s like dirt being shoved onto the grave.

BOGAEV: Right, it’s really layered visually.

ZIMMERMAN: Yes, and the longer you look at it, it starts to look like the spirit rising from the body, because it kind of wavers in the light.

BOGAEV: Exactly.

ZIMMERMAN: And all the suitors just kind of stand up, and some of the bags are still pouring, and then they step back to the spotlight. And then you hear, like, “Chook, chook, chook, chook, chook,” and all the bags of sand plunk down in front of them. And then they pick them up and carry them off. That’s a very layered image too because it’s like their bag of guts, their own urn, their own remains.

BOGAEV: Oh, I thought of it as their remains and their souls.

ZIMMERMAN: Oh, their souls. Their little souls floating down to the underworld. Yeah. So, if you do something poetically and metaphorically like that, it opens up meaning you get many, many meanings.

We’re not pretending these actors are really dying, but we’re presenting an idea or an image of death. But, it’s also a whole lot of other things.

It’s saying, “Look at what we’re doing and join hands with us across the footlights to make this thing work.” It doesn’t look like in the movies, but something about it is right.

BOGAEV: Well, live theater is one of the most ephemeral things on earth. I think we’re really feeling it after COVID and the lockdowns, just how important presence is. Just being with each other, breathing in this space. But there are people who still question the value of live theater and staging these ancient texts. What do you say to them?

ZIMMERMAN: I feel like COVID taught us that presence matters and presence is the calling card of the theater. That is our calling card. We have to—the actors have to show up, and the audience has to show up, and that’s rarer and rarer and rarer.

I actually am quite, believe it or not, hopeful. Very hopeful about the—because it’s—about the future of the theater—because it’s so unique. And you know, the theater is weathered. Come on, it’s weathered worse than a two-year shutdown. I mean, it’s weathered the—

BOGAEV: Well, plagues would count there. Yeah. Other plagues.

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. Plagues, wars, destructions of civilization. It’s weathered the invention of radio, film, and television. It’s weathered all of that. So, I have a lot of faith. It’s becoming a more and more special and rare and unmediated—you know, it’s an unmediated experience. I think that makes people happy. I do, you know.

BOGAEV: Are there any Shakespeare plays you’d like to tackle next?

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I mean, I would do, you know, drop a hat. I love directing Shakespeare. There’s a lot of them. I want to keep on. Compared to people who really direct Shakespeare, really direct work not their own all the time, I’ve not done that much. I’ve done maybe eight or something like that. That’s nothing compared to people who spend their lives in it. They’ve done eight Midsummers.

I did a Cymbeline at school and I would love to do Cymbeline professionally. There’s a ton of them. You know, I think Tempest is a real director’s play. I just saw Richard III and it kind of made me want to do Richard III. You know, I really do… you just want to be sort of close to that and hope that just by osmosis you kind of absorb some of this showmanship, you know?

BOGAEV: Why Cymbeline, particularly?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, Cymbeline’s up my alley in that it’s full of kind of craziness: being lost in the woods, and decapitated bodies, and people in disguise, and lost relatives, and has a kind of epic quality like that. And it’s difficult. It’s a bit difficult. I like that too.

BOGAEV: Well, just so much fun talking with you. I don’t want it to stop, but I’ll have to let you go.

ZIMMERMAN: Well, thank you.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much.

ZIMMERMAN: Thank you so much.

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WITMORE: That was playwright and director Mary Zimmerman, talking with Barbara Bogaev.

Metamorphoses at the Folger Theatre runs from May 7 to June 16, 2024.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica with help from Kendra Hanna. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Northwestern University and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice, to help others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts. Our building in Washington, DC, has been under construction for the past four years. But we’re looking forward to fully reopening on June 21, 2024. You can find more about the Folger at our website, folger.edu.

Thanks for listening. For the Folger Shakespeare Library, I’m Folger Director Michael Witmore.