Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Between 1348 and the early years of the 18th century, successive waves of the plague rolled across Europe, killing millions of people and affecting every aspect of life. Despite the plague’s enormous toll on early modern English life, Shakespeare’s plays refer to it only tangentially. Why is that? And what did people write about the plague in early modern England? Over the past 20 years, Rebecca Totaro has been collecting contemporary writing about the plague. She has written five books about its cultural impact. We asked her to join us for a conversation about what Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote about the plague—and why, just as often, they turned away from it. She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Rebecca Totaro is an associate dean and a professor of literature in the College of Arts & Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University. She has written or edited five books: Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture; Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, which she wrote with Ernest B. Gilman; The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603–1721; The Plague in Print; and Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literary Studies from More to Milton. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 13, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “’Twas Pretty, Though a Plague,” 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.

Charlotte Cushman was one of the most famous American theater artists of the mid-19th century. And while she was known for her Lady Macbeth and Oliver Twist’s Nancy, she was acclaimed for her performances as Romeo and Hamlet. The newest book about Cushman’s life is Tana Wojczuk’s "Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America’s First Celebrity." Cushman’s life was radical indeed. She played Shakespeare’s leading men with an emotionality and vulnerability that took audiences by surprise, started a bohemian artists’ colony in Rome, and lived publicly as a queer woman. We invited Wojczuk to join us on the podcast to chat about Cushman’s life, loves, work, tragedies, swordsmanship, and more. Tana Wojczuk is a senior nonfiction editor at Guernica. She teaches writing at New York University. She has worked as an arts critic for Vice, Bomb Magazine, and Paste and as a columnist for Guernica. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, Gulf Coast, Apogee, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Rumpus, Narrative, Opium Magazine, and elsewhere. "Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity" was published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in 2020. Wojczuk's appreciation for The Folger Shakespeare editions, "How Shakespeare Paperbacks Made Me Want to Be A Writer," appeared recently in The New York Times Magazine's Letter of Recommendation column. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 29, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Do You Not Know I Am a Woman?”, 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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to theater in the United States. Broadway and regional theaters are dark, and Shakespeare festivals across the country have cancelled their seasons. So it wasn’t a surprise when The Public Theater decided, for the first time in 66 years, that they couldn’t offer free Shakespeare in Central Park. But what they did instead made one of their scheduled productions—"Richard II," directed by Saheem Ali—more accessible to more people than ever before. The Public joined forces with New York’s public radio station, WNYC. Together, they created something that hasn’t been done before: a four-night serialized program that combined a presentation of "Richard II" with expert analysis and stories from cast members to contextualize the play in these unusual times. Director Ali worked hand-in-hand with WNYC producers Emily Botein, Matt Collette, and Isaac Jones to overcome massive challenges, like having twenty-six actors appear from twenty-six different locations and getting it all done in a compressed, 12-week period. We talk to Ali and Botein about just how they addressed those hurdles to create their radio production of "Richard II"—which you can listen to now as a podcast. Ali and Botein are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Saheem Ali is the director of The Public and WNYC’s radio production of "Richard II." Ali has directed nearly 25 plays, mostly in New York, over the past 10 years. He has his fingers crossed for two productions—in New York and in Berkeley—in 2021. Emily Botien is Vice President for On-Demand Content at WNYC public radio in New York, where she oversees national programs including “Death, Sex & Money.” From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published September 15, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Weeping Made You Break the Story Off” 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.

In the second of two episodes about Black Americans and Shakespeare, we talk with scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson about the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s: from Reconstruction, through the period of Jim Crow segregation, and into the Civil Rights Era. We’ll take a look at landmark performances like Orson Welles’s 1936 all-Black Macbeth and Paul Robeson’s groundbreaking Othello. We’ll also hear a less familiar story that dramatizes the tensions surrounding Shakespeare in the Black American theater—one set at Washington, DC’s Howard University, where a young Toni Morrison played Queen Elizabeth in the university’s production of Richard III in the early 1950s. Ayanna Thompson is a Professor of English and the director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Marvin McAllister is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They are interviewed by Rebecca Sheir. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. ©Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Our Own Voices with Our Own Tongues," was originally published January 28, 2015, and rebroadcast with an updated introduction September 1, 2020. This episode was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. Special thanks Dr. James Hatch, co-author, with the late Errol Hill, of A History of African American Theatre; Connie Winston, Anthony Hill and Doug Barnett, co-authors of The Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre; and Jobie Sprinkle and Tena Simmons at radio station WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina.

African American engagement with Shakespeare goes back a long way—maybe even farther than you'd imagine. And like so much else surrounding American race relations, African American performance of Shakespeare is inextricably linked to the experiences of slavery, freedom, Jim Crow segregation, and the battle for equal rights. In this episode, which we originally broadcast in 2015, we explore two periods in the long history of African American engagement with Shakespeare. One story begins in the 1820s, when freedom first came to the enslaved African Americans of New York. The other encompasses the long period of change stretching from the 1950s to today. We have help from five scholars of Shakespeare, race, and American History: - Kim Hall is a professor of English at Barnard College. - Caleen Sinnette Jennings is an actor, playwright, and professor of theater at American University in Washington, DC. - Bernth Lindfors is professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas. - Francesca Royster is a professor of English at DePaul University. - Shane White is a professor of history at the University of Sydney in Australia. This episode is narrated by Rebecca Sheir. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Freedom, Heyday! Heyday, Freedom!”, was originally February 11, 2015, and rebroadcast with an updated introduction on August 18, 2020. It was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. Edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. We had help gathering material for Shakespeare Unlimited from Esther French. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. We also had help from Britta Greene and Anne Marie Baldonado at Fresh Air with Terry Gross, who gave us their 1987 recording of August Wilson. Original music composed and arranged by Lenny Williams.

Anne and William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596, when he was 11 years old. We don’t know too much more about him. But novelist Maggie O’Farrell’s new book "Hamnet" delves into his story and comes away with a lyrical and moving portrait of a family’s grief. The novel is focused not so much on William Shakespeare—in fact, O’Farrell never actually mentions his name in the book—as it is on his family back in Stratford, and how they cope with Hamnet’s tragic death. On this episode, we talk to Maggie O’Farrell about how the idea for "Hamnet" came to her, the way she imagines Shakespeare and his family, and what she learned in the process of writing the book. She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Maggie O'Farrell is the author of eight novels: "After You'd Gone"; "My Lover's Lover"; "The Distance Between Us"; "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox"; "The Hand That First Held Mine; Instructions for a Heatwave"; and "This Must Be the Place." Her latest, "Hamnet," was published in the US by Knopf in 2020. It has been short listed for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. From the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 4, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “O My Son, My Son!” 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.

No two theater directors approach Shakespeare’s plays in the same way. When it comes to setting, blocking, costuming, casting, and cutting, there are countless ways directors can shape Shakespeare to make his works their own. It’s with this sense of infinite possibility in mind that we invited two theater directors to join us for a conversation about how they approach Shakespeare. What goes in to directing one of Shakespeare’s plays? Where does a director start? What do directors think about as they kick off rehearsals? Laura Gordon is a Milwaukee-based freelance theater director. She has directed at theaters including Utah State University, the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, and the American Players Theatre. Vivienne Benesch is the Artistic Director of PlayMakers Rep at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She has directed at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, the Chautauqua Theater Company and Conservatory, The Juilliard School, and, in 2019, Folger Theatre, where she staged Love's Labor's Lost. Gordon and Benesch are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 21, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “A Bill of Properties Such as Our Play Wants,” 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.

The Folger started with Henry and Emily Folger, two collectors who loved books and Shakespeare and had the means to pursue what they loved. They were supported by booksellers, who make their livelihoods poring through collections of books and ephemera and bringing those items to the people who want them. "The Booksellers," a new documentary directed by D.W. Young, explores the New York rare book world in all its depth, breadth, history, and quirkiness. In it, you’ll meet Syreeta Gates, who is preserving the artifacts of ‘80s and ‘90s hip-hop; Caroline Schimmel, a pioneering collecting of women’s writing; Jay Walker, the collector behind the Museum of the History of Human Imagination; Michael Zinman, who sought out “damaged” books at a time before other booksellers understood their real value; and many other passionate booklovers. We talked to D.W. Young to learn more about the present state of this community and to find out where it goes from here. Young is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. D.W. Young’s films have screened at festivals around the world, including the New York Film Festival, South by Southwest, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. "The Booksellers," executive produced by Parker Posey, is streaming on iTunes, Amazon, and other Video-On-Demand platforms in the US. It is available on DVD and through virtual cinema screenings. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published July 7, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “I Loved My Books,” 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.

Who were the actors who first performed Shakespeare’s plays? You might know the names of some of the King’s Men—the company of which Shakespeare was a shareholder—like Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, or Robert Armin. But who were their co-stars? How were they cast? And what was it like to watch their performances? In this episode, we talk to Dr. Lucy Munro, author of the latest book in Bloomsbury’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series, The King’s Men. By exploring theatrical contracts, the handful of existing cast lists, and what there is of 16th- and early 17th-century theater criticism, the book gives us a peek into the inner workings of the company that brought Shakespeare’s plays to life for the first time. Munro is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at King's College London. She is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, and Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674, published by Cambridge in 2013. She is the editor John Fletcher's Taming of the Shrew-sequel, The Tamer Tamed, for Methuen Drama in 2010. Her latest, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men, was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 23, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “What Players Are They?”, 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.

Every artist needs inspiration. In this episode, we talk to Sir Jonathan Bate. His book How the Classics Made Shakespeare, published by Princeton University Press in 2019, explores the Greek and Roman authors, narratives, and ideas that suffuse Shakespeare’s works. He was interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Sir Jonathan Bate is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University, and a senior research fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly provost of Worcester College. Bate’s 1997 book, The Genius of Shakespeare was called “The best book about Shakespeare for a generation” by The Times of London. His newest book, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, was just published in 2020 by Yale University Press.

A young woman falls asleep in the 21st century and slowly finds herself slipping into 16th-century England, where she falls in love with an obscure young poet named Will. Sandra Newman’s new novel The Heavens crosses genres. You could call it historical fiction, with its meticulously accurate 16th-century details. You could call it science fiction for its use of time travel and parallel worlds. It’s also a really good, sexy romance novel about Emilia Bassano, the woman who some believe was the inspiration for half of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Sandra Newman joined us recently to talk about what inspired this novel and what it tells us about love, mental illness, and the past, present, and future. Newman is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Sandra Newman is the author of four novels, including The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, Cake, and The Country of Ice Cream Star. Her latest, The Heavens, was published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, in 2019. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 26, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “If I Should Despair, I Should Grow Mad” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Special thanks to Derek Rusinek and James Walsh at Threshold Recording Studios NYC in Manhattan and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California for their technical help.

It’s quite a list: Hanged. Prison fever. Stabbed. Stabbed. Poisoned. Beheaded. Beheaded. “Malady of France.” Cannonball. Burnt. Bitten. Eaten. Mauled. Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things, but he really wrote a lot about death. Chemist and science communicator Dr. Kathryn Harkup’s new book is Death By Shakespeare. In it, she takes her readers through a fulsome exploration of death in the plays and provides plenty of grizzly explanations of just what causes it all. We talk to her about a some of those deaths, dying in Shakespeare’s world, and why gruesome deaths feature so prominently in stories from Shakespeare to CSI. Harkup is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Kathryn Harkup is a chemist, author, and science communicator. Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (published in the US by Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) is the third in her series of books joining popular fiction and science, which also includes A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie and Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 12, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Death is Certain,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer.

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 for comfort or wisdom? This episode of Shakespeare Unlimited will be a little different. We sat down with the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, and his predecessor in that office, Director Emerita Gail Kern Paster, to talk about the bits of Shakespeare that bring them solace. We also reached out to a few friends of the podcast and asked them to share a little Shakespeare with us. In the 52 minutes traffic of our episode, you’ll hear from Molly Booth, Ian Doescher, Lauren Gunderson, Keith Hamilton-Cobb, Derek Jacobi, Iqbal Khan, Fran Kranz, Ryan North, James Shapiro, Paul Werstine, Casey Wilder Mott, and Stephan Wolfert about the words they’ve been pondering in these troubling times. We hope you'll take some solace in those words too.  From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 28, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “One Thing to Rejoice and Solace In” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer.

Today, we think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a triumph. We read them, puzzle over them, and recite them. We compare our significant others to summers’ days, beweep our outcast states, and never admit impediments to the marriage of true minds. But it might surprise you to learn that in the past, the Sonnets didn’t have quite the same great reputation. We asked Roehampton University professor Jane Kingsley-Smith back to Shakespeare Unlimited for a second episode about the Sonnets’ tortuous history. The author of The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Kingsley-Smith tells us about periods in the 1600s and 1700s  when some readers thought the sonnets were inauthentic, or immoral, or just that they had too many puns. Finally, we pay a visit to the 1800s, when writers like William Wordsworth and Oscar Wilde salvaged the poems’ good name. Jane Kingsley-Smith is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith is Deputy Head of the Department of English & Creative Writing at Roehampton University in London. She edited Love's Labor's Lost for the Norton Shakespeare Series Third Edition, and The Duchess of Malfi for Penguin in 2015. She is the author of Shakespeare's Drama of Exile, published by Palgrave in 2003, and Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Her latest book, published in 2019 by Cambridge is The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published April 14, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Return to the 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. We had technical helped from Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Dom Boucher at The Sound Company in London.

Is there a right way to interpret Shakespeare’s plays? No, says Oxford University’s Emma Smith, and there’s a good reason for that. In her new book, This Is Shakespeare, she writes that Shakespeare’s plays are characterized by gaps—unknowable elements and unanswered questions that require us to insert our own readings. These gaps, opened up by history, dramatic from, and Shakespeare’s tendencies as a writer, mean that these plays are much less tied up, spelled out, or clear cut than we like to think. In this episode, Barbara Bogaev talks to Emma Smith about her book, and some specific gaps in Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. Dr. Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Faculty of English and a Fellow of Hertford College at Oxford University in England. Her new book, This Is Shakespeare, was published in the US by Pantheon, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2020. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 31, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “That’s Not My Meaning,” 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 helped from Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Rich Woodhouse at Electric Breeze Audio Productions in Oxford, England.