Shakespeare Unlimited podcast
William Shakespeare and his works are woven throughout our global culture, from theater, music, and films to new scholarship, education, amazing discoveries, and more. In our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Shakespeare opens a window into topics ranging from the American West, to the real history of Elizabethan street fighting, to interviews with Shakespearean stars. As you’ll hear, he turns up in surprising places, too—including outer space. Join us for a “no limits” tour of the connections between Shakespeare, his works, and our world.
Shakespeare in Solitary
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 58 | For ten years, Laura Bates, a professor at Indiana State University, taught Shakespeare to a group of inmates considered the “worst of the worst” – men incarcerated in the solitary confinement unit at Indiana’s Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Every week, Professor Bates sat down in between the cells of these men to discuss Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Richard II. She shares her experiences in a book titled Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard.
Anecdotal Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 57 The curses associated with the Scottish play. Using a real skull for the Yorick scene in Hamlet. Over the centuries, these and other fascinating theatrical anecdotes have attached themselves to the plays of William Shakespeare. Many…
How Shakespeare's First Folio Became a Star
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 56 Today, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623, can sell for millions of dollars. But the First Folio wasn’t always valued so highly. In this podcast episode, two experts in the First Folio…
Elizabethan Medicine
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 55 Being a patient in Shakespeare’s time was an adventure. You might be told to drink liquid gold or syrup of violets. You might undergo a violent purgation to take the bad humors out of your body.…
Keith Hamilton Cobb on American Moor
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 54 Othello is the story of a tragic murder and suicide involving a dark-skinned general and his aristocratic, white-skinned bride. Who should direct it? Who’s “allowed” to? What if, say, a white director and the actor he’s…
The Food of Shakespeare's World
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 53 This episode shifts slightly from our usual intense focus on Shakespeare. Instead, we are talking about the world that he inhabited, or at least a small part of that world: the kitchen. Kitchens, and what goes…
Recreating the Boydell Gallery
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 52 In the decades after Shakespeare’s death, his works temporarily fell out of favor. His renaissance is usually credited to actor-manager David Garrick, who staged a Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Riding Garrick’s coattails, an artistic entrepreneur named…
Worlds Elsewhere
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 51 In 2012, Andrew Dickson watched a Shakespeare play in London that set him off on a quest. When it ended, he had traveled to Poland, Germany, India, China and all across the United States. He chronicled…
Othello and Blackface
On the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Ian Smith and Ayanna Thompson talk about Elizabethan modes of blackface—which included covering a performer’s body with dyed cloth to simulate blackness—and how Smith’s insight changes how we understand Othello.
Shakespeare and Religion
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 49 The period when Shakespeare was writing was one torn by disagreements over the proper method of observing Christianity in England. Protestantism was at war with Catholicism and the Church of England often employed coercion and even…
Shakespeare in Africa
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 48 When the British came to colonize the African continent in the middle of the 1800s, they brought Shakespeare with them. But after the British left power, it was often Shakespeare who leaders in African countries summoned…
Creating Shakespeare's First Folio
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 47 We likely wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays without the 1623 First Folio. Imagine a world without Macbeth, Twelfth Night, or Julius Caesar. Emma Smith offers an intimate, step-by-step story of how it was created.