Julia Armfield Reimagines King Lear in a Drowning World
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 03/11/2025
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...
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Julia Armfield Reimagines King Lear in a Drowning World
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
How does Shakespeare’s King Lear resonate in a world facing climate catastrophe? Novelist Julia Armfield explores this question in Private Rites, a novel set in a near-future London reshaped by rising sea levels. Following three sisters grappling with their father’s death, Private Rites weaves together themes of inheritance, power, and familial wounds—echoing Shakespeare’s tragic monarch while carving out a distinctly modern, queer perspective. Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea, discusses her fascination with disaster narratives, the inescapable dynamics of sibling...
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Lauren Gunderson on the Women of Hamlet
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What if Gertrude had more power than we thought? What if Ophelia’s fate wasn’t sealed from the start? And what does it really mean to mother a prince who might be losing his mind? Playwright Lauren Gunderson, one of the most produced living playwrights in America, takes on Hamlet in her latest play, A Room in the Castle. This sharp, feminist reimagining follows Ophelia, her handmaid, and Queen Gertrude as they navigate the dangers of Elsinore, wrestling with the weight of survival, duty, and defiant hope in the face of chaos. Gunderson, known for her witty and powerful...
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Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
How did early modern England understand race and how has that influenced our thinking? Race is often considered a recent construct, but Shakespeare’s works—both his plays and poetry—reveal a diverse world already aware of race, identity, and difference. In this episode, Patricia Akhimie, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, discusses the growing field of study and what we can learn from it. She is joined by two of the scholars contributing essays to the guide, Dennis Britton and Kirsten Mendoza, who are exploring the ways race, gender, and power intersect in...
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Nisha Sharma on Adapting Shakespeare for Modern Romances
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
How do Shakespeare’s timeless themes translate to the South Asian diaspora? Could the man from Stratford himself be reimagined as a meddling auntie? Novelist Nisha Sharma’s If Shakespeare Were an Auntie trilogy takes on this challenge, taking inspiration from The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night to create contemporary romance novels set in the vibrant, close-knit world of the South Asian community. Sharma’s books explore love, identity, and social norms through characters navigating family expectations and community dynamics....
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Olivia Hussey: The Girl on the Balcony (Rebroadcast)
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Olivia Hussey, whose spirited portrayal of Juliet when she was just a teenager herself became iconic for generations of people watching the 1968 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, died on December 27, 2024. In 2019, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Hussey. To honor her life and work, we’re bringing it to you again. Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in Romeo and Juliet. When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted her and Leonard Whiting, the young actor playing Romeo, to global stardom. For many Shakespeare lovers,...
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Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with Darren Freebury-Jones
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What 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...
info_outlineHow does Shakespeare’s King Lear resonate in a world facing climate catastrophe? Novelist Julia Armfield explores this question in Private Rites, a novel set in a near-future London reshaped by rising sea levels. Following three sisters grappling with their father’s death, Private Rites weaves together themes of inheritance, power, and familial wounds—echoing Shakespeare’s tragic monarch while carving out a distinctly modern, queer perspective.
Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea, discusses her fascination with disaster narratives, the inescapable dynamics of sibling relationships, and how Shakespeare’s work inspires her storytelling. From the storm in King Lear to the watery depths of her fiction, she reflects on how queerness, horror, and the climate crisis intersect in literature.
Julia Armfield is a fiction writer living in London with her wife and cat. Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review, and Best British Short Stories in 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award in 2018 and won the White Review Short Story Prize in 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize in 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize in 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2022 and won the Polari Prize in 2023. Her second novel, Private Rites, was longlisted for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024.
From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 11, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.