Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with Darren Freebury-Jones
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 12/31/2024
Inside Hamlet’s Head with Jeremy McCarter
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What if, instead of just watching Hamlet, you could step inside the prince’s mind? A revelatory new audio production reimagines Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy as a first-person experience told through Hamlet’s POV. We only hear the scenes in which he appears—every soliloquy becomes an inner monologue, every whisper a voice in our ears. With stunning binaural sound design by Tony Award–winner Mikhail Fiksel and an intimate, close-mic performance by Daniel Kyri (“Chicago Fire”) as the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet is transformed into a deeply personal journey through grief, paranoia,...
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Shakespeare, Money, and Meaning-Making
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Can reading King Lear help us rethink economic policy? Can Measure for Measure shape how we talk about justice, or Hamlet help us face grief? That’s the idea behind an ambitious project at Montreal’s McGill University called Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems. Led by Laurette Dubé, professor emerita of management, and Paul Yachnin, professor of Shakespeare studies, the initiative brings together experts in economics, health policy, AI, and robotics, with theater and literary artists and humanities scholars, to explore how Shakespeare’s plays can help us think...
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Staging Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
When live performance shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen weren’t sure when—or if—they’d ever be onstage again. So, they turned to an unexpected venue: Grand Theft Auto Online, a sprawling, open-world video game best known for fast cars, chaotic and often criminal missions, and player-driven mayhem. Amid the game’s unpredictable violence, they decided to stage Hamlet—it would be the first ever complete performance of a Shakespeare play within a video game. Filmmaker Pinny Grylls joined them and turned the experiment into a documentary: Grand...
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Simon Russell Beale on Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Titus
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Called “the finest actor of his generation,” Sir Simon Russell Beale has played just about everyone in Shakespeare’s canon—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff, Malvolio, Iago—and most recently, Titus Andronicus, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this episode, Beale reflects on the Shakespearean roles that have shaped his career and how his approach to them has evolved over time. He shares what drew him to Titus, and how he found surprising tenderness in Shakespeare’s brutal tragedy. The actor revisits past performances, exploring grief in Hamlet, aging and dementia in King Lear,...
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Shakespeare’s Boy Player Alexander Cooke
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
In Shakespeare’s time, the actresses were boys—and for the most celebrated of them, fame came early but could end abruptly with a voice change. In this episode, author joins us to talk about the world of boy players, young apprentices who performed women’s roles onstage in England before 1660. Galland’s novel, Boy, follows one of these real-life members of Shakespeare’s company, Alexander “Sander Cooke,” and his fictional best friend, Joan, a fiercely curious young woman who disguises herself as a boy to pursue knowledge. Drawing inspiration from Shakespeare’s...
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King Lear and Mao’s China, with Nan Z. Da
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Nan Z. Da, in her book The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, finds unsettling parallels between Shakespeare’s play and 20th-century China under Mao Zedong. Da, a literature professor at Johns Hopkins University, weaves together personal history and literary analysis to reveal how King Lear reflects—and even anticipates—the emotional and political horrors of authoritarian regimes. From public punishments to desperate displays of flattery, from state paranoia to family betrayal, she shows how Shakespeare’s tragedy resonates with the lived experiences of generations shaped by Maoism. She...
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Top Pop Songs of the 1600s
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What were the top musical hits of Shakespeare’s England? What lyrics were stuck in people’s heads? What stories did they sing on repeat? The 100 Ballads project is a deep dive into the hits of early modern England—a kind of 17th-century Billboard Hot 100. Drawing from thousands of surviving printed ballads, researchers Angela McShane and Christopher Marsh have ranked the most popular songs of the period. These broadsides—cheaply printed sheets sold for a penny—offer surprising insight into the period’s interests, humor, and even news headlines. McShane and Marsh discuss what these...
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The Yorkist Pretender, with Jo Harkin
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Who was Lambert Simnel—the boy who nearly claimed the Tudor throne? In late 15th-century England, identity wasn’t just a matter of birth—it could be a political weapon, a tool for rebellion, and sometimes, an outright performance. The story of Simnel, a boy plucked from obscurity and passed off as the York heir, reveals how precarious the Tudor dynasty really was—and how easily the lines between truth and fiction could blur. Author Jo Harkin joins us to explore the strange life of Simnel, the so-called Yorkist “pretender” who nearly toppled Henry VII. In her new novel The...
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Surekha Davies on the Making of Monsters
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What do monsters tell us about how people understand the world—and each other? In early modern Europe, the monstrous wasn’t just the stuff of fairy tales. It was a way to categorize, explain, and justify human differences. Historian Surekha Davies joins us to explore how ideas of wonder, race, and the monstrous shaped European thought in the age of empire. These weren’t just abstract concepts—they were embedded in scientific discourse, travel writing, and the visual culture of the time. Shakespeare’s plays reflect these cultural currents. In The Tempest, the character of...
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Reimagining Judith Shakespeare with Grace Tiffany
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Judith Shakespeare’s life is a mystery. While history records her as the younger daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, much of her story remains untold. In her new novel, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, author and Shakespeare scholar Grace Tiffany brings Judith to life—filling in the gaps with adventure, resilience, and rebellion. A sequel to My Father Had a Daughter, this novel follows Judith into later adulthood. No longer the headstrong girl who once fled to London in disguise to challenge her father, she is now a skilled healer and midwife. However, when she is accused...
info_outlineWhat does it mean to be called an “upstart crow”? In 1592, a pamphlet titled Greene’s groats-worth of witte described William Shakespeare, in the first allusion to him as a playwright, with this phrase, calling him “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” This phrase sparked centuries of speculation. As Darren Freebury-Jones explores in his book, Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer, Shakespeare’s so-called borrowing was neither unusual for the time nor a weakness—it was ultimately a testament to his genius.
Exploring how Shakespeare navigated a competitive theatrical scene in early modern England, Freebury-Jones reveals the ways in which Shakespeare reshaped the works of contemporaries like John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe into something distinctly his own. By combining traditional literary analysis with cutting-edge digital tools, he uncovers echoes of Lyly’s witty comedies and gender-bending heroines, Kyd’s tragic revenge dramas, and Marlowe’s powerful verse in Shakespeare’s early plays.
This episode sheds light on Shakespeare’s role as a responsive and innovative playwright deeply embedded in the early modern theatrical community. Listen in to learn more about the influences on the “upstart crow” as he created a canon of timeless works.
Dr Darren Freebury-Jones is author of the monographs: Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival (Routledge), Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd (Manchester University Press), and Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers (Manchester University Press). He is Associate Editor for the first critical edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd since 1901 (Boydell and Brewer). He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston’s dramatic corpus as part of the Oxford Marston project and is General Editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene (Edinburgh University Press). His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed in national newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent as well as BBC Radio. His debut poetry collection, Rambling (Broken Sleep Books), was published in 2024. In 2023 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship.