Al Letson on his play Julius X
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 09/09/2025
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_outlineYou 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 Malcolm X. The play mixes lines from Shakespeare with Letson’s original poetry and songs. It expands the roles of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as that of Cinna the poet.
Letson discusses the origin story of Julius X - a hint: it involves an audition, his lifelong love for Malcolm X, and the lessons he learned as an artist from Bill Moyers' series, The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets.
From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 9, 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.
Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and, as a teenager, began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows.
In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and DC Comics recently released his series Mister Terrific: Year One.