Patrick Stewart on a Life Shaped by Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 10/10/2023
Judi Dench: Looking Back at Seven Decades of Shakespeare, with Brendan O'Hea
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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, hijinks with Sir Ian McKellen, why it’s easier to laugh while working on a tragedy, and more. Dame Judi Dench has played nearly all of Shakespeare’s great roles for women, plus a few non-Shakespearean parts, too, including the title role in...
info_outline
Shakespeare and the Environment, with Todd Andrew Borlik
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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 environmentalism in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain is out now from Oxford...
info_outline
Ramie Targoff on Women Writers of the English Renaissance
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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 Cary, she might have thought differently about the fate of her fictional Judith Shakespeare. Ramie Targoff's new book, Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, explores the lives and works of those...
info_outline
Green World: Michelle Ephraim on Discovering Shakespeare and Reevaluating The Merchant of Venice
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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 Biblical interpretation of some lines from the play as she researched her dissertation. In Ephraim’s memoir, Merchant refracts through the changing...
info_outline
Eddie Izzard on Performing Hamlet Solo
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Eddie Izzard has a long record of dramatic roles. She has starred in two plays by David Mamet, and earned a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in the play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. She had a recurring role in Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen, and even played the title character in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. 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. Performing every role in those shows requires a marathoner’s stamina. Fortunately, Izzard...
info_outline
Shakespeare and Disgust, with Bradley J. Irish
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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-indulgent food Antony eats in Egypt, in Henry IV’s preoccupation with sickness and disease in Henry IV, and beyond. Bradley...
info_outline
Rita Dove on Shakespeare and Her Poem of Welcome for the Folger
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
When the Folger reopens on June 21 and you come to take a walk in our new west entrance garden, look down. There, you'll see a new poem, written for the Folger by former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Dove joins us on the podcast to read that poem aloud for the first time. Plus, she reflects on how writing for marble is different from writing for the page, and remembers the moment she discovered Shakespeare. Rita Dove is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Rita Dove served as the US Poet Laureate for two terms, from 1993 to 1995, and as a special bicentennial consultant to the Library of Congress in...
info_outline
John Guy and Julia Fox on Their New Biography of Anne Boleyn
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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, they focus on Anne’s years of training in the courts of Europe, which shaped her into the formidable woman whom Henry VIII came to regard as an intellectual equal....
info_outline
David and Ben Crystal Share Shakespeare Quotations for Everyday Life
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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 your everyday existence. The Crystals—David is a linguist, Ben is an actor—are the father-son duo behind the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary; Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion; and The Oxford Dictionary of...
info_outline
What Happened to the Princes in the Tower, with Philippa Langley
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
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. Langley convinced academic historians and archaeologists at the University of Leicester to excavate the parking lot where she believed Richard was buried. There, they found a body,...
info_outlineSir 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.
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, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leo Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Ngofeen Mputubwele in New York and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.