Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

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.

Despite our country feeling more divided than it has in 50 years, there are still things that tie us together. Loving our families, cheering on a favorite team, and—according James Shapiro—Shakespeare. Shapiro is an eminent Shakespeare scholar, who, like many Americans, has found himself confused and troubled lately by the divisions in our country. And as an eminent Shakespeare scholar, he looked to Shakespeare to respond to that confusion. In his new book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, Shapiro puts forward what he sees as a completely new and unique approach to American history. The book looks at times when our nation seemed at its most fragile and disconnected and tells those stories through their connections to Shakespeare. James Shapiro is the Larry Miller professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and the Shakespeare scholar in residence at New York's Public Theater. He has written several award-winning books on Shakespeare including A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, Contested Will; Who Wrote Shakespeare?, and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. His latest book, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, was published by Penguin Press in 2020. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published March 17, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “O Nation Miserable,” 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 at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Jim Bittle, Senior Director of Broadcast and Multimedia Technology at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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. Why do these stories fascinate us? What can they tell us about Lincoln, and about Shakespeare’s place in the American story? Michael Anderegg is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of numerous books including Cinematic Shakespeare, and Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture. His book Lincoln and Shakespeare was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2015. Anderegg is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published March 3, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Welcome, My Tall Fellow,” 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.

You probably know where Shakespeare got the ideas for his plays. The Histories come from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Caesar and other Roman plays depend on Plutarch’s Lives. The Comedy of Errors comes from Plautus’s Menaechmi. Troilus and Cressida borrows from the Illiad. The Winter’s Tale repackages Robert Greene’s Pandosto. But what if we told you that a number of his plays draw inspiration from folktales, versions of which exist not only in England, but all over the world? Charlotte Artese’s new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, anthologizes some of the folktales that made their way into Shakespeare’s plays. For example, Lear includes elements of a story sometimes called “Love Like Salt,” part of a larger tradition of Cinderella stories. The Merchant of Venice plays out much like a Chilean folktale called “White Onion.” Wacky tales of twins predate not only Shakespeare, but also Plautus. We talk to Artese about some of these stories and about how she became interested in folklore’s influence on Shakespeare (it involves Led Zeppelin). She is Chair of the English Department at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Shakespeare and the Folktale was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Artese is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 18, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “The Strangest Tale That Ever I Heard,” 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 Kevin Rinker at public radio station WABE in Atlanta, Georgia.

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 what they meant was, in many ways, much different from what they mean today. In this episode we talk to two authors about how people read, acquired, and collected books in Shakespeare’s time. Stuart Kells is the author of Shakespeare’s Library (Counterpoint, 2019). It speculates on what books the Bard might have owned and tells some intriguing stories about people over the years who’ve claimed either to have found the library or to have owned pieces of it. Jason Scott-Warren’s book is Shakespeare’s First Reader (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), which dissects the library of Richard Stonley, an Elizabethan bureaucrat who was the first person we know of to buy a printed book written by Shakespeare—a copy of Venus and Adonis that Stonley picked up on June 12, 1593. Kells and Scott-Warren are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Stuart Kells is an Australian writer. He is the author of Penguin and the Lane Brothers, and The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders. Jason Scott-Warren is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Cambridge University in England. Recently, we had him on Shakespeare Unlimited when he discovered, based on research by Claire M.L. Bourne, that the First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia was once owned by John Milton. From the Folger's Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published February 4, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Give Me Some Ink and Paper,” 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 and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, Roger Chatterton at Kite Recording Studio in Cambridge, England, and Simon Knight in the recording studio at La Trobe University’s College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce in Melbourne, Australia.

Did Shakespeare intend to publish his sonnets? For whom were they written? What do they reveal about their author? We talk to Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith about her newest book, The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. The book is a social history of the sonnets’ reception, starting with a glowing 1598 review that it's likely practically no one ever read and travelling through over 400 years of readers adoring and abhorring Shakespeare’s 152 complicated poems. Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith edited Love's Labor's Lost for the Norton Shakespeare Third Edition, and The Duchess of Malfi for Penguin in 2015. She is the author of Shakespeare's Drama in Exile (Palgrave, 2003), and Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Kingsley-Smith is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published January 21, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "To Thee I Send This Written Embassage,” 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 Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Gareth Wood at The Sound Company in London.

We’re willing to bet that at some point in school, you read at least of one Shakespeare’s plays. Did you ever wonder why that is? How did Shakespeare go from popular entertainment to freshman-year staple? Professor Joseph Haughey of Northwest Missouri State University takes us back to a time when educators didn’t take Shakespeare seriously and English wasn’t even a subject in school. Haughey’s research focuses on the evolution of the English curriculum in American schools, and, in particular, the role of Shakespeare in that evolution. He is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published January 7, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “O This Learning, What A Thing It Is!,” 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 Paul Luke at VoiceTrax West in Studio City, California, and Patty Holley at public radio station KXCV/KRNW in Maryville, Missouri.

In this episode, we spend 40 minutes with one of the world’s most influential directors. Peter Brook has directed John Gielgud, Glenda Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Adrian Lester, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, and Patrick Stewart. His 1970 "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" is that among the play’s most lauded and best known productions. His 1968 book "The Empty Space," now an e-book from Nick Hern Books, is a classic of theater writing. Brook’s work is characterized by the search for new theatrical modes and artistic languages, and at 94, he continues searching. His newest work, "Why?", co-written and co-directed by longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, opened in Paris in June, finished a run at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience in October, and will soon begin a tour of China, Italy, and Spain. A new book, "Playing by Ear: Reflections on Sound and Music," is also being published this year. Barbara Bogaev interviews the director about his remarkable career, his illustrious collaborators, and the big question: what makes good theater? From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published December 10, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “My Age is as a Lusty Winter,” 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 technical helped from Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Alan Leer at The Sound Company Studios in London.