Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

Shakespeare was a member and shareholder of a company called the King’s Men. Learn more about the inner workings of the company that brought many of Shakespeare’s plays to life for the first time.

Every artist needs inspiration. In this podcast episode, we talk to Sir Jonathan Bate. His book, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, explores the Greek and Roman authors, narratives, and ideas that suffuse Shakespeare’s works.

A young woman falls asleep and slowly finds herself slipping into 16th-century England, where she falls in love with an obscure young poet named Will.  Sandra Newman joins us to talk about her novel, The Heavens, and what it tells us about love, mental illness, and the past, present, and future.

Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things, but he really wrote a lot about death. We talk to Dr. Kathryn Harkup, author of, Death By Shakespeare, about death in the plays, dying in Shakespeare’s world, and why gruesome deaths feature prominently in stories from Shakespeare to CSI.

Do you have a passage from Shakespeare that you return to in difficult times? Is there a sonnet or soliloquy you keep coming back to? Folger Director Michael Witmore and his predecessor, Director Emerita Gail Kern Paster, talk about the bits of Shakespeare that bring them comfort.

Today, we think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a triumph. But Jane Kingsley-Smith shares that in the 1600s and 1700s some readers thought the sonnets inauthentic or immoral, until the 1800s, when writers like William Wordsworth and Oscar Wilde salvaged their good name.

Is there a right way to interpret the plays? No, says Emma Smith, and there’s a good reason for that. In her book This Is Shakespeare, she writes that they are characterized by gaps—unknowable elements and unanswered questions that require us to insert our own readings.

Even with our country feeling more divided than it has in 50 years, there are still things that tie us all together. Loving our families, cheering on a favorite team, and—according to James Shapiro—Shakespeare.

There are lots of stories about Abraham Lincoln and his passion for Shakespeare. Some are true, while others are made up out of whole cloth. We talk to scholar Michael Anderegg about Lincoln’s love of Shakespeare and the anecdotes that recount it.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 138 You probably know where Shakespeare got the ideas for his plays. His Histories come from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Caesar and other Roman plays depend on Plutarch’s Lives. The Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi. But what…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 137 Do you have a book that means something special to you? 400 years ago, when printed books were a fairly new thing, they meant something to their owners too. But in many ways, what they meant…

Did Shakespeare intend to publish his sonnets? For whom were they written? What can they reveal about their author? We talk to Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith about her newest book, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.