Julia Armfield Reimagines King Lear in a Drowning World
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 03/11/2025
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,...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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_outline
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...
info_outline
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,...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
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.