Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with Darren Freebury-Jones
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 12/31/2024
London's First Playhouse and Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Before Shakespeare became a literary icon, he was a working writer trying to earn a living in an emerging and often precarious new industry. In The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, Daniel Swift explores the dream of making money from creating art, a dream shared by James Burbage, who built The Theatre, the first purpose-built commercial playhouse in London, and a young Shakespeare. Nobody had ever really done that before, with playwrights at the time notoriously poor. Swift shows that Shakespeare’s creativity unfolded in a rapidly changing...
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Mary, Queen of Scots, with Jade Scott
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Imprisoned for nearly 20 years by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, fought her battles through words, sending and receiving coded letters hidden in books, garments, and even beer barrels. Historian Jade Scott, of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has uncovered the human and political depths behind Mary’s captivity through 57 recently decrypted letters, coded missives that reveal her as a strategist, an adept diplomat, and a woman navigating the perilous politics of Elizabethan England. In her new book, Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots, Scott...
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Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Long before Shakespeare became a household name, there was Richard Burbage. As the first actor to play Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear, Burbage helped define what it meant to be a Shakespearean actor. A commanding performer, he became one of early modern England’s first celebrities—celebrated for his emotional power and versatility, as well as his entrepreneurial savvy as an early theater owner. In her new book "Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage: A ‘Delightful Proteus,’" scholar Siobhan Keenan explores the actor’s remarkable career and his pivotal partnership...
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Harriet Walter: New Words for Shakespeare's Women
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Shakespeare’s plays are filled with unforgettable women—but too often, their voices are cut short. Ophelia never gets to defend herself. Gertrude never explains her choices. Lady Anne surrenders to Richard III in silence. In her new book, She Speaks: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said, acclaimed actor Dame Harriet Walter imagines what those characters might tell us if given the chance. Through original poems, Walter reimagines moments of silence, expands on fleeting lines, and provides depth to women who were left without a final word. Walter invites us to see Shakespeare’s plays...
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Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both born in 1564, rising from working-class origins finding success in the new world of the theater. But before Shakespeare transformed English drama, Marlowe had already done so—with Tamburlaine the Great and the introduction of blank verse to the stage. As Stephen Greenblatt argues in his new biography, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater can be seen as “pre- and post-Tamburlaine.” Shakespeare learned from Marlowe, borrowed from him,...
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Al Letson on his play Julius X
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
You may know Al Letson as a journalist—he’s the host of the popular investigative podcast Reveal. Before that, he created and hosted the public radio show State of the Re:Union. But Letson is also an actor, writer, playwright, and poet. His play Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare kicks off Folger Theatre's 2025-26 season. Julius X isn’t an adaptation of Julius Caesar — it’s a new play that borrows from Shakespeare’s language, characters, and plot to tell a different story. In Letson’s play, Julius X is a fictionalized version of...
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Director Rosa Joshi on Julius Caesar Today
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar feels urgently contemporary in Rosa Joshi’s new production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—one of America’s largest and longest-running theater festivals, now in its 90th season. Staged in partnership with Seattle’s upstart crow collective, the production explores the threat of autocracy, drawing on global histories of dictatorship. Performed entirely by women and nonbinary actors, Joshi’s Julius Caesar offers new perspectives on a historically male-dominated political landscape. The result is a fresh reading of...
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Reading Jane Austen in the 21st Century with Patricia A. Matthew
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
250 years after her birth, Jane Austen is more popular than ever, with the publication of new editions of her novels and numerous new film adaptations in production. But what does it mean to read and edit Jane Austen today through the lens of colonialism, cartography, and race? Scholar Patricia A. Matthew, who recently edited new editions of three Austen novels, joins us to explore the ongoing fascination with Jane and share new research about the...
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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...
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.