Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Women didn’t act on London’s professional stages until after the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1661. But Dr. Pamela Allen Brown, author of The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage, believes that the movement towards women in the theater actually began in the 1570s, when Italy’s commedia dell’arte troupes first stepped set foot in London. The troupes featured something most English people hadn’t seen at that point: the Divina—a woman who played the Innamorata role, one of the two lovers in plays we’d characterize today as romantic comedies. English diplomats had seen the women who played these parts—who would later be called “divas”—but in the 1570s, divas started coming to England. And, Professor Brown says, their presence began to change attitudes about what theater could be, what plays should be about, and—maybe most importantly—about what kinds of people could play female roles. Pamela Allen Brown is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Pamela Allen Brown is a Professor of English at the Universit

An Argentine woman translates "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" while incessantly taping travel postcards to a wall. An actress in Buenos Aires seduces her colleague while rehearsing a scene for "Twelfth Night." A theater troupe flirts its way through rehearsals of "As You Like It" in an Argentine forest. If you’re noticing a pattern here, you’re not mistaken. These scenes all come from the films of Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro. Born in Buenos Aires and now living in New York, Piñeiro has developed a cycle of six beautifully-filmed movies he calls “The Shakespeare Reads,” all of which are based around the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies. Piñeiro talks with Barbara Bogaev about his unique approach to his work and his craft. Matías Piñeiro is a screenwriter, director, and filmmaker. The six films in his “The Shakespeare Reads” series are "Rosalinda," "Viola," "The Princess of France," "Hermia & Helena," "Isabella," and the short film "Sycorax." Stream all of these films on MUBI, or buy them on Blu-ray

Over the centuries there have been hundreds of editions of Shakespeare’s plays: Small, inexpensive schoolbook copies of individual plays, massive, leatherbound editions of the complete works, and everything in between. At some point, every one of those editions passed under the eyes of an editor who decided which version of which disputed word would be included, how characters’ names would be spelled, whether a quarto’s version was the best to use here or maybe the version in the First Folio, and so on. While the names of the many of Shakespeare’s male editors are well-known, up until now there has been little to nothing written about another group of Shakespeare editors: Women, who—since the early 19th century—have labored editing Shakespeare in the shadows of men, sometimes getting no credit at all, and sometimes—as you’ll hear—only getting blame. While Molly Yarn was writing her doctoral thesis on women editing Shakespeare, she discovered almost seventy female editors of Shakespeare. Now, she’s written

Even 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare’s influence is profound. But is it right to say that he changed everything? That the assertion Stephen Marche makes in his book "How Shakespeare Changed Everything." In the book, Marche catalogs Shakespeare’s influence on (among other things) sex, language, psychology, and starlings. He talks with Barbara Bogaev about those legacies and more. Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. His book "How Shakespeare Changed Everything" was originally published by Harper Collins in 2011. His newest book, "The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future," has just been published by Simon & Schuster. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 15, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Influence Is Thine,” 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

Between 1821 and 1960, it would have been vanishingly rare to see a Black woman onstage performing Shakespeare. In Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald’s chapter in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, “Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance,” she digs deep into the history of American professional theater in the United States to find records of every Black woman who has been paid to perform or recite Shakespeare on stage in the United States. Barbara Bogaev talks with MacDonald about four performers who took to the stage in those 139 years: The African Grove Theatre’s “Miss Welsh,” Henrietta Vinton Davis, Adrienne McNeil Herndon, and Jane White. Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald is an Associate Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky and a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. In 2011, she participated in the Folger Institute conference “An Anglo-American History of the KJV.” MacDonald’s new book, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory i

It might surprise you to learn that just about every production of a Shakespeare play that you’ve ever seen onstage has been cut, from student shows to Broadway revivals. Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide, a new book by Aili Huber and Dr. Toby Malone, lays out some of the reasons that theater-makers cut Shakespeare’s plays, and suggests some handy questions directors and dramaturgs should ask themselves as they take a pen to the plays. Barbara Bogaev interviews Huber about the argument that brought Huber and her co-author together, strategies for cutting plays, and how a good cut can reveal a new and exciting story. Aili Huber has been a theater director for over 20 years. She holds an MFA in directing from Mary Baldwin University and the American Shakespeare Center. Her new book, co-written with Dr. Toby Malone of SUNY-Oswego, is called Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide. It was published by Routledge in December 2021. From the Shakespeare Unlimit

A banished queen receives word that her husband and three daughters are dead. Learwife, a new novel by J.R. Thorp, picks up where Shakespeare’s King Lear leaves off: The queen is Berte, Lear’s wife and Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia’s mother, and she has been exiled in an abbey for the past fifteen years. Now, newly informed of her family members’ deaths, she remembers her life with them and tries to plot her way forward. Thorp talks with Barbara Bogaev about her inspirations (including Eleanor of Aquitaine, The English Patient, and a stray line from an Agatha Christie novel), her new backstories for Lear’s characters, and the roles of grief and nothingness in the book. J.R. Thorp is a librettist and writer working across a variety of forms, primarily with composers, choirs, orchestras, and musical organizations. Learwife is her first novel. It was published in the US by Pegasus Books in December 2021. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 4, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights

Dr. Lena Cowen Orlin’s new book, The Private Life of Shakespeare, isn’t exactly a biography. Rather, it’s an exhaustive return to the primary sources that document Shakespeare’s life, a book that scholar James Shapiro says “demolishes shoddy claims and biased inferences that have distorted our understanding of Shakespeare’s life.” Orlin focuses on five much-talked-about elements of Shakespeare’s life, and then lays out fact after fact after fact about them drawn from her assiduous research. We talk with her about a few of those elements, including Shakespeare’s relationship with Anne Shakespeare, how he escaped an apprenticeship and career in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his funerary monument in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. Orlin is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Lena Cowen Orlin is an Emerita Professor of English at Georgetown University. From 1982 to 1996, Orlin coordinated postdoctoral seminars and conferences as Executive Director of the Folger Institute. In 2011 and 2012, she researched at the Folge

Sir Antony Sher, one the greatest Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries, died last week in Stratford Upon Avon. He was 72. In 2018, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Sir Antony and, to honor his life and work, we’re bringing it to you again. What does it take to be a great Shakespearean? For Sher, the answer was preparation. On this podcast episode, Sher talks about his experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company and his roles as Lear in 2016, Falstaff in 2014, and Richard III in 1984. In preparing for these roles, Sher kept meticulous diaries, which he later published as books. There was 'Year of the King' for Richard and 'Year of the Fat Knight' for Falstaff. Then, there was 'Year of the Mad King,' published by Nick Hern books in 2018, which chronicles his doubts, his fears, his marriage proposal, his illnesses, and all of the life and death that swirled around him as he prepared for the most grueling role Shakespeare ever wrote for an older actor: King Lear. Sher is intervi

Many of us have holiday traditions: we trim trees, spin dreidels, trick-or-treat, set off fireworks, and host parties. People had holiday traditions in Shakespeare’s time too: they crossdressed, roleplayed, acted in amateur theatricals, fought, ate pancakes, and watched cockfights. If you’re thinking some of those holiday traditions sound familiar from Shakespeare’s plays… well, you’re right. Dr. Erika T. Lin studies holidays in early modern England. Some of them, like Christmas and Easter, are still big dates on today’s calendars, while others, like Martlemas, Shrovetide, Midsummer, or The May, are less familiar. Lin talks with Barbara Bogaev about how people celebrated and how they might have felt about Shakespeare’s plays in a period when the line between holiday festivity and theater wasn’t quite so clear. Dr. Erika T. Lin is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at CUNY Graduate Center in New York. You can find her writing on Elizabethan festivals and holidays in a couple of places. Her art

Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa both grew up speaking English and Spanish, and they share memories of being made to feel like their voices, dialects, and identities weren’t “good enough” for Shakespeare. Now, both DeCure and Espinosa are vocal coaches and actors. They share an example of how an actor might embody their text, praise on the late great Raul Julia, and explain how important it is for actors to bring their 'voces culturales' to Shakespeare’s words. Cynthia Santos DeCure is an Assistant Professor of Acting at the Yale School of Drama. She was most recently the dialect coach for El Huracán at Yale Rep, and she was an on-set dialect coach for Orange is the New Black on Netflix. Micha Espinosa is a Professor in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre at Arizona State University. She was the Voice and Text Director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s world premiere production of La Comedia of Errors, a bilingual adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play from the Play on! translation by Ch

Close reading of Shakespeare is not a new concept. But this kind of close reading is more challenging—and it can help us interpret Shakespeare’s words in new and profound ways. Our guests are two contributors to the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race: Dr. Patricia Akhimie, who wrote a chapter on race in the comedies, and Dr. Carol Mejia LaPerle, who wrote a chapter on race in the tragedies. Together, they explore the ways that Shakespeare’s language—think descriptors like “fair,” “sooty,” or “alabaster”—constructs and enshrines systems of race and racism. Akhmie and LaPerle are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Patricia Akhimie is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She is a 2021 - 22 Research Fellow at the Folger. Dr. Carol Mejia LaPerle is Professor and Honors Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She has participated in numerous Folger Institute scholarly programs and was a speaker at the 2019 Race and Pe

Theater artists José Cruz González and David Lozano join us in this episode. Their conversation “On Making Shakespeare Relevant to Latinx Communities” appears in the new book Shakespeare and Latinidad. González and Lozano talk with Barbara Bogaev about adapting and translating Shakespeare, performing and directing it in ways that make it relevant to Latinx audiences, and whether the Bard has a place at theater companies working to carve out a space for Latinx voices. José Cruz González received the NEA Directing Fellowship in 1985 and the 2010 Kennedy Center National Teaching Artist Grant. His plays include American Mariachi, Sunsets & Margaritas, and The Astronaut Farmworker. He’s also a professor of Theatre Arts at Cal State Los Angeles. David Lozano is Executive Artistic Director of Cara Mía Theatre in Dallas. In 2014, he was recognized by The Dallas Observer as one of six “Masterminds of Arts & Culture.” He co-wrote and directed Deferred Action and Crystal City 1969, which was named the “Best New Play

Shakespeare wrote a lot about English kings and queens. Over the last three hundred years, a lot of English kings and queens have gotten really into Shakespeare. Our guest Gordon McMullan is the Principal Investigator of Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family, a new online exhibition that examines the long relationship between Shakespeare and the British royal family. That includes queens pretending to love Shakespeare as much as they thought Elizabeth I did, princes patterning themselves after Hal, and kings writing melancholy marginalia in copies of The Complete Works. McMullan is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Gordon McMullan is a Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King's College London. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 28, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Say, What Art Thou That Talk'st of Kings and Queens?” was was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It

In Mike Lew's play "Teenage Dick," Richard, a high-school senior with cerebral palsy, is determined to become class president by any means necessary. Commissioned by theater artist Gregg Mozgala and The Apothetae, the company Mogzala started to explore the disabled experience, Lew's comedy drops Shakespeare's "Richard III" in a modern American high school. Barbara Bogaev interview Lew about about the play’s origins, tropes around disability, and how his story reframes Richard's motivations. Teenage Dick will be onstage three times this fall and winter, in a production directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel: at Washington, DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company September 22 – October 17, at Boston's Huntington Theater December 3 – January 9, and at California's Pasadena Playhouse February 1 – February 27. Mike Lew is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, The Mellon Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Ma-Yi Theater in New York, and the former La Jolla Playhouse Artist-in-Residence. His plays include Tiger Style!, Bike America

In her new novel, "All’s Well," author Mona Awad combines elements of Shakespeare's "All’s Well That Ends Well" and "Macbeth" and the 1999 movie "Election" to tell the story of Miranda Fitch, a theater professor with a mutinous cast of actors and excruciating chronic pain. What do those plays have in common, and how did Awad weave them together to create her darkly funny new book? She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Mona Awad is the author of three novels. "13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl," published by Penguin in 2016, won the Amazon Best First Novel Award. Her 2019 novel, "Bunny," was a finalist for a GoodReads Choice Award for Best Horror. Her novel "All’s Well" was published by Simon & Schuster and Penguin Canada in August 2021. Awad has taught creative writing at Brown University, the University of Denver, Framingham State University, Tufts and in the MFA program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 31, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Libr

In Shakespeare’s time, people talked about going to hear a play and going to see one in equal measure. So, what exactly do we hear when we hear one of Shakespeare’s plays? What information do we gather from its words, music, or sound effects? What if it has been adapted, updated, or translated? We ask Dr. Carla Della Gatta of Florida State University, co-editor of the new book "Shakespeare and Latinidad." Her study of Spanish-language or bilingual Shakespeare productions has led her to think a lot about the act of listening to a play. She talks to Barbara Bogaev about the ways a production of Shakespeare can challenge us to hear in new ways. Dr. Carla Della Gatta is an assistant professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of "Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater," which will be published in 2022, and co-editor of "Shakespeare and Latinidad," released by Edinburgh University Press in June 2021. She is a past recipient of a Folger fellowship. From the Shakespeare Un

The next time someone complains about a director changing or tampering with Shakespeare… we’ve got an answer for them. The first generation of theater artists after Shakespeare weren’t particularly concerned about performing Shakespeare's plays the way they appear in the First Folio. After the English Civil War, the Puritan-led government outlawed theater for eighteen years. When Charles II ascended to the throne, in the period we now call the Restoration, theater came back to life. With no new plays, producers like William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew turned to Shakespeare… but they made some pretty big changes to keep up with the times. Restoration-era Shakespeare featured new characters, changed scripts, and grand musical interludes inspired by court masques. Dr. Richard Schoch of Queen’s University Belfast lay out this history in his new book, "A Short History of Shakespeare in Performance." We spoke with Schoch about the theater in the Restoration and what we can learn from them after our own year wi

In her play "Where We Belong," Mohegan director playwright, and performer Madeline Sayet recalls her 2015 journey to the UK to pursue the PhD in Shakespeare that she never ended up getting. The play, now available in a world premiere film adaptation produced by Woolly Mammoth Theater Company and the Folger, explains why she left the degree behind and explores what it means to belong in a complicated world. We talk to Sayet about growing up Mohegan in Connecticut and her evolving relationship with the Shakespeare today. Stream "Where We Belong," produced in association with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, on-demand through July 11. Madeline Sayet is a Mohegan theater-maker. She serves as the Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP) and Co-Artistic Director of Red Eagle Soaring: Native Youth Theatre. In addition to "Where We Belong," her plays include "Up and Down the River," "Antigone Or And Still She Must Rise Up," and "Daughters of Leda." This fall, she joins the faculty

What would we find out about you if we got to know your neighbors? What if we took a walk around the neighborhood where you live? That's the way that Geoffrey Marsh hopes to learn more about Shakespeare in his new book, Living with Shakespeare. Starting with a 1598 tax roll that lists Shakespeare's names among the residents of St. Helen's parish, the historian and director of the theater and performances collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum meets the people and explores the places that surrounded Shakespeare in the late 1590s. The people include lord mayors, an unusual concentration of doctors, and Shakespeare's saavy but combative colleague James Burbage. The places include St. Helen's Church, the Theatre, and a notable well about a hundred yard's from Shakespeare's house. Geoffrey Marsh is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, NPR One, or wherever you get your podcasts. Geoffrey Marsh is the director of the Theat