Surekha Davies on the Making of Monsters
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 04/08/2025
The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey the rhythm and spirit of Shakespeare’s words in a language that follows fundamentally different rules? Author and translator Daniel Hahn explores these questions in his book, . He interviews translators from around the world, providing unique perspectives on Shakespeare’s language and impact. Some of Shakespeare’s best-known lines can prove the most difficult to...
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The Improvised Shakespeare Company
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that’s never been written—and will never be performed again? The Improvised Shakespeare Company is a long-running ensemble that performs entirely unscripted plays in the style of Shakespeare. Founded in Chicago in 2005, the company has spent two decades building a devoted following through performances in the United States and internationally. In this episode, Blaine Swen, the company’s founder, and Ross Bryant discuss how their performances take shape in real time, beginning with a single audience-suggested title and unfolding into a...
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Adjoa Andoh on Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Known to many as Lady Danbury in Netflix’s Bridgerton, Adjoa Andoh, MBE, is also a celebrated Shakespearean actor and director. Across her career, Andoh has returned to Shakespeare not as a fixed canon, but as a space for reimagining power, identity, and belonging. Her landmark Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe, created with the UK’s first all-women-of-color company, reexamined ideas of nationhood and empire following Brexit, asking who gets to claim the story of England and how those stories are constructed. In this episode, Andoh reflects on Shakespeare as a profoundly...
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Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life. Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than...
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The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new cultural experience with an ambitious project in Pall Mall: a gallery devoted entirely to scenes from Shakespeare. Boydell commissioned leading British artists to paint pivotal moments from the plays, then sold engraved reproductions for museum-goers to take home with them. The Gallery quickly became a sensation and was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince...
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Whitney White and Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White’s work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at major institutions including The Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and, most recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her projects include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, The Last Five Years, Macbeth in Stride, and By The Queen, which was featured in the Folger’s 2025 Reading Room Festival. In this episode, White discusses , her four-play musical cycle created for the RSC, where it’s now receiving its world...
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Shakespeare and Mathematics
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times, mathematician Rob Eastaway explores how mathematical thinking shaped Shakespeare’s language and imagination. Shakespeare lived at a moment of major intellectual change, when England was newly encountering Indo-Arabic numerals, experimenting with new systems of calculation, and redefining ideas of measure and...
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The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Why does Samuel Pepys’s diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, historian Kate Loveman examines how Pepys’s extraordinary consistency as a diarist has made his writing one of the richest records of everyday life in Restoration England. Writing almost daily for nearly a decade, Pepys’s diary documents everything from politics and scientific discoveries to theater and fashion. Even in times of crisis, Pepys reveals life’s ordinary concerns, from worrying about the source of hair for wigs during the Great...
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Celebrating Elizabethan Cooking, with Sam Bilton
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What did people really eat in Shakespeare’s England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant and surprising world of early modern cuisine—where sugar was locked away like treasure, fresh salads were everyday fare, and a “banquet” meant a “post-feast after party” dessert course. Bilton brings to life the flavors behind Shakespeare’s food references: mince pies, herb-packed green sauces, saffron-brightened tarts, and even whimsical dishes crafted to look like something else entirely. These foods reveal a world shaped by global trade,...
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Hamnet, with Chloe Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Hamnet, the acclaimed novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is now a major film. The story imagines the life and death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, whose loss would later echo through one of his most famous tragedies, Hamlet. O’Farrell joins director and co-writer Chloé Zhao to reveal how they adapted the novel for the big screen. With Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William, the film reframes the Shakespeare family story as one of deep love, rupturing grief, and artistic creation. O’Farrell and Zhao discuss developing the screenplay together, interpreting Shakespeare as a husband...
info_outlineWhat 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 Caliban—described as savage, deformed, and barely human—embodies the fears and fantasies that haunted early modern encounters with the so-called “New World.” Davies unpacks how Caliban’s portrayal draws on the same ways of thinking that labeled certain people monstrous and how Shakespeare’s work offers a lens into the period’s views on race, colonialism, and imagination.
As we confront new technologies like artificial intelligence, Davies helps us consider what today’s “monstrous others” might be and how early modern ways of thinking linger in our discussions of what it means to be human.
Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has published essays and book reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.
From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 8, 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.