Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. Advancing knowledge and the arts. Discover it all at www.folger.edu. Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places—not just literature and the stage, but science and social history as well. Our "Shakespeare Unlimited" podcast explores the fascinating and varied connections between Shakespeare, his works, and the world around us.
Episodes
May 7, 2024 • 32 mins
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 ab...
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April 23, 2024 • 40 mins
In her new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Dame Judi Dench and actor/director Brendan O'Hea chat about her long history with the Bard. On this episode, Dench and O'Hea join host Barbara Bogaev to talk about Dench's experiences playing Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Titania. Plus, parrots, Polonius, dirty words, Ian McKellen, why it's easier to laugh while working on a tragedy, and more.
Dame Judi Dench has play...
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April 9, 2024 • 33 mins
Land enclosure. Wildlife management. Erosion. Pollution. Mining practices. Today, we’d call these environmental issues. But, hundreds of years before the modern environmental movement coalesced, these issues also appeared in Shakespeare’s plays. We talk to Todd Andrew Borlik, a professor at the University of Huddersfield and author of Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, about ecology and e...
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March 26, 2024 • 37 mins
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents “Judith” Shakespeare, and concludes that this female genius would have been doomed.
But that’s not the end of the story. If Woolf had read Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer (nee Bassano), Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Carey, she might have thought differently about the fate of her...
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March 12, 2024 • 33 mins
In her new memoir, "Green World," Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim tells the story of how she came to Shakespeare relatively late in her education. Although she didn’t grow up with Shakespeare, Ephraim became transfixed by "The Merchant of Venice" as a grad student. In particular, she found herself drawn to Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, and the mysteries of their relationship. That curiosity led Ephraim to discover a novel Bibli...
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February 27, 2024 • 32 mins
Eddie Izzard has a long record of dramatic roles. But it’s her decades of experience as a stand-up comedian that prepared Izzard for her recent solo shows—first Great Expectations, and now Hamlet at New York’s Greenwich House Theatre.
From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published February 27, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associa...
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February 13, 2024 • 34 mins
Maybe there really was something rotten in Denmark. On this episode, we talk with Bradley J. Irish about disgust in Shakespeare. In his new book, Irish identifies the emotion, which combines physical revulsion and moral outrage, as one of the central thematic emotions in Shakespeare’s plays. In his close readings across the canon, Irish finds disgust everywhere: in Caius Martius Coriolanus’s disdain for ordinary Romans, in the over...
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January 30, 2024 • 37 mins
When the Folger reopens on June 21 and you come to take a walk in our new west garden, look down at the garden bed. There, you'll see a new poem, written for the Folger by US Poet Laureate emerita Rita Dove. This week, she joins us on the podcast to read that poem aloud for the first time. Plus, Dove reflects on how writing for marble is different from writing for the page, and remembers the moment she discovered Shakespeare. Rita ...
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January 16, 2024 • 33 mins
Even after appearing in a Shakespeare play, historical romance novels, a Broadway musical, and prestige TV dramas, there's still more to learn about Anne Boleyn.
A new biography by the team of husband-and-wife historians John Guy and Julia Fox takes a scholarly look at the evidence surrounding Anne’s rise and fall. They freshly examine well-known accounts, and also take in passing references in neglected sources. In particular, th...
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January 2, 2024 • 35 mins
Shakespeare has the perfect lines for riding into battle or stumbling around a stormy heath. But does he have the right stuff to take us on a daily commute or a trip to the grocery store? On this episode, David and Ben Crystal join us to talk about their new book, "Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life," which offers daily Shakespeare quotes you can apply to everyday life.
The Crystals—David is a linguist, Ben is an actor—are the f...
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December 19, 2023 • 33 mins
The most unforgivable crime in Richard III has to be when the king orders the murder of his two young nephews, Edward and Richard. But what if Richard III was framed?
Philippa Langley is the amateur historian whose commitment to righting a historical wrong led to the discovery of Richard III’s remains a decade ago. Langley wasn’t a scholar—she was a screenwriter and a member of the Richard III Society. But she had become certain t...
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December 5, 2023 • 31 mins
What comes to mind when you think about a "court jester?" What if we told you that fools in the Tudor court didn’t look or sound anything like the zany clowns you have in mind?
Historians don’t know much about Will Somer. We know he was Henry VIII’s court fool, but the details of his biography—and, crucially, his comedy—were never recorded.
By Shakespeare’s time, Somer had become famous. Whenever a poet or playwright needed to r...
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November 21, 2023 • 30 mins
Isabelle Schuler’s debut novel Queen Hereafter attempts to fill in a backstory for Lady Macbeth. The book takes place in 11th century Scotland, where a king’s reign tended to be short and brutal. For her version of Lady M, Schuler didn’t rely on Shakespeare or his source material, Holinshed’s Chronicles. Instead, she looked to the annals and sagas that predate Holinshed. There, Schuler found Gruoch, who married Macbethad (the histo...
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November 7, 2023 • 29 mins
The First Folio—the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays—hit bookstores 400 years ago this November. Emma Smith of Oxford University tells us just what this famous book has been up to for the past four centuries. We explore notable collectors like Sir Edward Dering and our founders, Emily and Henry Folger; how the 18th-century slave trade supercharged the book’s value; how the 235 extant copies scattered across the world;...
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October 24, 2023 • 31 mins
We talk with Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber about how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury Group made Shakespeare their own. Garber’s most recent book—her twentieth—is Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. In it, she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, that circle of early 20th-century intellectuals included novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, painter Vanessa Bell, director Dadie Rylands, ...
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October 10, 2023 • 31 mins
Sir Patrick Stewart joins us on the podcast to talk about how Shakespeare has shaped his life. Stewart tells host Barbara Bogaev about his Yorkshire youth, his audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Starfleet Captain Jen-Luc Picard, and more.
Stewart's memoir, "Making It So," is available now from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
From the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 10, 202...
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September 26, 2023 • 29 mins
Sometimes, the beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry takes your breath away. In the case of today’s guest, Shakespeare gave him his breath back.
You may recognize actor Michael Patrick Thornton from his roles on TV series like Private Practice and The Good Doctor. Twenty years ago, Thornton had just started out in his acting career when he suffered two spinal strokes that nearly ended his life. He survived, but the strokes took away his ...
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September 12, 2023 • 34 mins
We talk with author Katherine Rundell about the extraordinary life —or should we say lives? — of John Donne, who wrote some of the 17th century’s most complex and intellectually dazzling poetry. Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and the author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne takes us through Donne’s evolution from hotshot poet to penniless prisoner to rock star preacher. Rundell has also written si...
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August 29, 2023 • 33 mins
Today, we sail the seven seas with Shakespeare. In addition to being a dedicated swimmer, Steve Mentz is a professor at St. John’s University. His books, including 2009’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, connect literary criticism with marine ecology. Mentz talks with Barbara Bogaev about Shakespeare’s oceanic metaphors, how much Shakespeare really knew about the ocean, and what plays like The Tempest, King Lear, and Twelfth N...
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August 15, 2023 • 32 mins
Can you love Shakespeare and be an antiracist?
Farah Karim-Cooper's new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest. Karim-Cooper also looks at the ways Shakespeare’s work became integral to Britain’s imperial project, and its sense of cultural superiority. But for all this, Karim-Cooper is an unapologetic Shakespeare fan. It's ri...
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