Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

When did the concept of race develop? How far should we look back to find the attitudes that bolster white supremacy? We ask Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, an assistant professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, and the author of a chapter in the monumental new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race called “Barbarian Moors: Documenting Racial Formation in Early Modern England.” Dadabhoy takes us back to Shakespeare’s London—a more diverse city than you might have imagined—to look at the racial ideologies reflected in two plays: George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar and William Shakespeare’s Othello. Plus, we learn more about race in medieval crusade and conversion romances, and get a sense of how Dadabhoy approaches issues of race in her Shakespeare classes. Dadabhoy is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy is an assistant professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Her chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race is called “Barbarian Moors: Documenting Racial Formation in Early Modern England.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Dadabhoy held fellowships at the Folger in 2011 and 2016, and participated in a Folger NEH Summer Institute "Shakespeare from the Globe to the Global" in 2011. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 25, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “In the Old Age, Black Was Not Counted Fair,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode available on folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Over 400 years after Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in 1609, what is left to learn? "All the Sonnets of Shakespeare," a new edition of the sonnets published in 2020, takes some bold steps to help us look at the poems with new eyes. The book, co-edited by Dr. Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells, dispenses with the Sonnets’ traditional numbering and arranges them in the order in which Edmondson and Wells believe they were written. It also includes nearly thirty additional sonnets drawn from the texts of Shakespeare’s plays. As a result, the collection is a fresh take on the Sonnets, Edmondson tells us, one that dispatches with the “Fair Youth” and “Dark Lady” narrative and helps us better understand Shakespeare as a writer and thinker. Edmondson is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. The Rev. Dr. Paul Edmondson is the Head of Research and Knowledge and Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. All the Sonnets of Shakespeare is published by Cambridge University Press. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 11, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “He Writes Brave Verses,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript or every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Frannie Shepherd-Bates founded Shakespeare in Prison in 2012. Nine years later, SIP is the signature community program of the Detroit Public Theatre, and has worked on a total of eight plays with a women’s ensemble at Huron Valley Correctional Facility and a men’s ensemble at Parnall Correctional Facility. When one of the members of the men’s ensemble suggested that SIP should find a way to share their work to make it easier for others to approach, he inspired a new project. Shakespeare in Prison is creating a new critical edition of "Richard III" that pairs Shakespeare’s text with the perspectives of incarcerated women who worked with the play over the course of 2016 and 2017. We speak with Frannie Shepherd-Bates about SIP and the book, "Richard III—In Prison: A Critical Edition," which she says offers readers a chance to approach the play from a place of “radical empathy.” Shepherd-Bates is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Frannie Shepherd-Bates is the Director of Shakespeare in Prison for the Detroit Public Theatre, where she’s also an actor, director, choreographer, and dialect coach. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 27, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Your Imprisonment Shall Not Be Long,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

The National Theatre’s new production of "Romeo and Juliet" was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production’s director, was tasked with turning it into a 90-minute film shot entirely in the National’s Littleton Theatre. Now, as the film approaches its United States premiere, Godwin sees "Romeo and Juliet" as a play uniquely suited to our pandemic moment. We spoke with him about how the pandemic affected the production logistically and thematically, as well as about learning how to direct a film and working with actors like Josh O’Connor, Jessie Buckley, and Tamsin Grieg. Godwin is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. "Romeo and Juliet" airs in the United States at 9 pm EDT on April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday—on PBS Great Performances. Simon Godwin is the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published Tuesday, April 13. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Never Was a Story of More Woe,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Today, the texts of roughly three thousand plays from the great age of Elizabethan theater are lost to us. The plays that remain constitute only a sixth of all of the drama produced during that period. How do we make sense of a swiss-cheese history with more holes than cheese? The Lost Plays Database tries to fill in those holes. It’s an open-access forum for information about lost plays from England originally written and performed between 1570 and 1642. The database collects the little evidence that remains of the lost plays, like descriptions of performances, lists of titles, receipts, diaries, letters, or fragments of parts. David McInnis, an Associate Professor at Australia’s University of Melbourne and one of the founders of the Lost Plays Database, has collected some of his discoveries about lost plays, as well as the new theories they have spawned, in a new book, "Shakespeare and Lost Plays." We spoke with McInnis about a few favorite lost plays and how researching them is critical to understanding the works that have survived. David McInnis is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. David McInnis is an Associate Professor in English and Theatre Studies, Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His new book, "Shakespeare and Lost Plays," was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 30, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Praising What is Lost,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

He was in a shipwreck. He was at Jamestown. He was on the Mayflower. And maybe, just maybe, he’s in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Documentary filmmaker Andrew Buckley’s ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, was the only passenger on the Mayflower who had previously been to the Americas. Eleven years before the Mayflower landed in what is now Massachusetts, Hopkins sailed aboard the Sea Venture, a ship bound for Jamestown that was blown off-course by a hurricane and wrecked in Bermuda. Among Hopkins’s fellow passengers on the Sea Venture was William Strachey, a poet and playwright whose account of the ill-fated voyage may have inspired Shakespeare’s "The Tempest." Buckley’s new documentary, "Stephano: The True Story of Shakespeare’s Shipwreck," traces Hopkins’s travels in England and the Americas and links him to The Tempest’s drunken, mutinous butler, Stephano. We talk to Buckley about the documentary, walking in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, and what the story reveals about the early colonization of North America. Buckley is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Andrew Buckley is the creator and host of the public media series Hit and Run History. "Stephano: The True Story of Shakespeare’s Shipwreck," premiered on Rhode Island PBS in January 2021. Learn about broadcasts, screenings, and video-on-demand opportunities to watch the film at hitandrunhistory.com. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 16, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “How Now, Stephano!” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

For generations, artists have been shaping and changing Shakespeare to fit their times. The best adaptations add specific textures of place and culture, or a fluidity of language that can take centuries-old work and make it brand new. Seattle Shakespeare Company is presenting one of those works: a Salvadoran-American adaptation of "Hamlet" called "house of sueños," by actor and playwright Meme García. In "house of sueños," sisters Rina and Amelia prepare to celebrate Mom’s marriage to their new Stepdad. But when Amelia tells her sister of the mysterious voice and shadowy figure she saw in the attic last night, it becomes clear that not all in this house is as it seems. García’s play is being released as a special five-episode series from the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Rough Magic podcast. You can listen to it through March 17 wherever you get your podcasts or on the company’s website, https://www.seattleshakespeare.org/houseofsuenos/. We talked to García about adapting Shakespeare, mental illness in Hamlet and in their own experiences, and how they crafted the language of their play. García is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Meme García is a Fulbright Scholar with a Master’s degree in Classical Acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. As an actor, they have performed with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, upstart crow collective, and Seattle Shakespeare Company, among other theaters. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 2, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “What Dreams May Come,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

When you think about the Harlem Renaissance, theater might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But, says Dr. Freda Scott Giles, theater played a significant role in the blossoming of Black American arts and culture of the 1920s and '30s. Of course, because there’s little in the English-language theater untouched by Shakespeare, he was present in the Harlem Renaissance too. Banner Shakespeare productions included Orson Welles’s hit “Voodoo” "Macbeth," produced by the Federal Theater Project, and the "Midsummer"-inspired "Swingin’ the Dream," which was a Broadway flop despite the talents of musician Louis Armstrong and comedian Moms Mabley. We talk to Dr. Giles about how the artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance regarded the Bard. Plus, we visit the African Company of the 1820s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to learn about more than a century of Black responses to Shakespeare. Freda Scott Giles is Associate Professor Emerita of Theater at the University of Georgia. She was a contributor to three books: "Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration," published in 2020; "Constructions of Race in Southern Theatre: From Federalism to the Federal Theatre Project," published in 2003; and "American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity," which was published in 1995. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 16, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “I Here Engage My Words,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Dr. Naomi Miller’s novel "Imperfect Alchemist" is about one of early modern England’s most significant literary figures: a poet, playwright, translator, scientist, and colleague of writers like Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, John Donne, and Emilia Lanier Bassano. Her name was Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. We talk to Miller about how she imagined the lives and voices of these literary lights, as well as Shakespeare, in her book. Plus, she discusses female alchemists of Elizabethan England, Sidney’s friends and beneficiaries, and how class shapes her characters’ outlooks. Naomi Miller is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Naomi Miller is a professor of English, as well as the Study of Women and Gender, at Smith College. She has written and edited nine books about early modern women authors and their worlds. Her first novel, "Imperfect Alchemist," was published by Allison & Busby in 2020. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 2, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Your Partner in the Cause,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Based on his knowledge of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson of Harvard University knew just how HBO's "Game of Thrones" would play out. Jon Snow, the illegitimate son, was a Richard III type, who would win the crown (and our hearts). But Daenerys Targaryen, as a kind of Henry VII, would defeat him in battle and win it back, restoring peace and order. Turns out he was wrong about all of that. But as Wilson kept watching, he began to appreciate the other ways "Game of Thrones" is similar to Shakespeare—like the way that both Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin’s stories translate the history of the Wars of the Roses into other popular genres. Jeff Wilson’s new book, "Shakespeare and 'Game of Thrones,'" explores some of the ways that Shakespeare influenced "Game of Thrones"… as well as some of the ways that "Game of Thrones" has begun to influence Shakespeare. Wilson is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson is a faculty member in the Writing Program at Harvard University, where he teaches the Why Shakespeare? section of the University's first-year writing course. His new book, "Shakespeare and 'Game of Thrones,'" was published by Routledge in 2020. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 19, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City California. Special thanks to DC-based playwright Allyson Currin for finding all of the "Game of Thrones" clips that appear in this episode.

Does Hamlet live in a Ptolemaic or Copernican solar system? Is Queen Mab a germ? Which falls faster: a feather or the Duke of Gloucester? In Shakespeare’s time, new scientific discoveries and mathematical concepts were upending the way people looked at their world. Many of those new ideas found their ways into his plays. We speak with Dr. Natalie Elliot about how Shakespeare interpreted the scientific innovations of the early modern period in his art. She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Natalie Elliot is a storyteller, science writer, and a member of the faculty at St. John’s College. Her essay “Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science” was published in the Winter 2018 edition of The New Atlantis. Elliot is currently working on two books: an exploration of Shakespeare's engagement with early modern science called "Shakespeare and the Theater of the Universe," and a comic novel about woolly mammoths called "Megafauna." From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 5, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “If This Be Magic, Let It Be an Art,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

John Tufts was playing Hal in a production of "Henry IV, Part 1" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Every night, he would call Falstaff “that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly.” Hal is calling Falstaff is gross and overstuffed, but Tufts started to think that a roast Manningtree ox sounded actually pretty good. That role inspired the actor and cook to write a cookbook, "Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table," a collection of over 150 recipes inspired by Shakespeare’s words and adapted from actual 16th- and 17th-century recipes. We hopped on Zoom and asked Tufts to tell us about the book and give us a remote cooking demonstration. He obliged by teaching our host, Barbara Bogaev, how to make a pork pasty inspired by Titus Andronicus and the mid-17th-century chef and author Robert May. Bon appétit! Award-winning actor John Tufts has performed at theaters across the country, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (where he is a member of the Acting Company and performed in over 20 of Shakespeare's plays), Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Actor's Theater of Louisville, Ensemble Studio Theater, Guthrie Theater, Primary Stages, The Mint Theater Company, and others. He is the author of "Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table," which is available on his website, john-tufts.com From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 8, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Make Two Pasties,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Christine Albright-Tufts and Chris Spurgeon.

For most of the 1700s, Shakespeare was considered a very good playwright. But in the 1800s, and especially during the Victorian period, Shakespeare became a prophet. Ministers began drawing their lessons from his texts. Scholars wrote books about the scriptural resonances of his words—often while taking those words out of context. Shakespeare’s works, the Victorians believed, offered religious revelations. In his new book, "The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century," University of Washington Associate Professor of English Charles LaPorte examines this moment in literary and religious history. We invited him to join us on the podcast to tell us how people in the 19th century thought about Shakespeare, how the moment helped give rise to the “authorship controversy,” and how sometimes, even today, we read Shakespeare like the Victorians. LaPorte is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. "The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Dr. Charles LaPorte's previous book, "Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible," was named Best First Book in Victorian Studies by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in 2011. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 24, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “I Am No Thing To Thank God On,” was produced by Richard Paul. 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 Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

In his classes at Binghamton University, David Sterling Brown and his students examine Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of Critical Race Theory. You might have heard about Critical Race Theory lately: put simply, it’s a way of looking at society and culture that focuses on the intersections of race, law, and power. Ever since George Floyd’s killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis outraged much of the nation, Critical Race Theory has taken on a new urgency for millions of Americans examining race, law and power with new eyes. Meanwhile, millions of other Americans, pointing to the realities of their own day-to-day lives, are basically saying: “I told you so.” What does it mean to read a play like Titus Andronicus with questions of race in mind? Brown, who has written extensively about that play, joins us on the podcast to discuss the ways that such a reading reveals an entire dimension of racial imagery and racial violence. We also talk about what it means for theaters and cultural institutions to engage in anti-racist work. David Sterling Brown is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. David Sterling Brown is a professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University/State University of New York. He is an executive board member of the RaceB4Race conference series. He is the author of “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” a chapter in the anthology Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); “Remixing the Family,” which appeared in Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (The Arden Shakespeare, 2019); and “The ‘Sonic Color Line’: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men,” published in the August 16, 2019 edition of The Sundial. He is currently finalizing his book project, Black Domestic Matters in Shakespearean Drama. More of his work has been published or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies, Radical Teacher, Hamlet: The State of Play, White People in Shakespeare, The Hare, Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, Shakespeare and Digital Pedagogy, and other venues. With Jennifer L. Stoever, he joined the Folger Institute in August for a Critical Race Conversation: “The Sound of Whiteness, Or Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Other “Race Plays”’ in Five Acts.” Watch it now on YouTube. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 10, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, ““Coal-Black is Better Than Another Hue,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

In March, theaters were beginning to cancel ongoing and upcoming productions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Glasgow-based actor Robert Myles had just lost a gig that would have taken him through April. He’d been chatting with his wife about what to do, and one night, he tweeted: "In response to #Covid_19, I'm going to set up an online #Shakespeare play-reading group via Zoom or similar. Once a week, evenings UK-time so US people can join during the day as well. We have to do what we can to stay connected and creative over this time. Anyone interested?" His tweet blew up, and that play-reading group became The Show Must Go Online. The hugely successful series, available for free on YouTube, is working through all of Shakespeare’s plays in the order in which they are believed to have been written. The Show Must Go Online creatively uses the everyday facts of life in a pandemic—living rooms, laptops, and, of course, Zoom—to bring actors from around the world together in innovative performances of Shakespeare’s plays. We talked with Myles about The Show Must Go Online’s incredible success, the process of creating virtual theater, and the community his project has created. He is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. New Show Must Go Online productions happen every Wednesday at 7 pm BST/2 pm EDT. To find out more, contribute, and watch all of their past performances, visit robmyles.co.uk/theshowmustgoonline/. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 27, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, ““Kindly to Judge Our Play,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.