Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

The National Theatre’s new production of Romeo & Juliet was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production’s director, was tasked with turning it into a 90-minute film.

Today, the texts of roughly 3,000 plays from the great age of Elizabethan theater are lost to us. The Lost Plays Database tries to fill in those holes, collecting the little evidence that remains of these lost plays.

He was in a shipwreck. He was at Jamestown. He was on the Mayflower. And maybe, just maybe, he’s in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Stephen Hopkins was the only passenger on the Mayflower who had previously been been to North America.

For generations, artists have been shaping and changing Shakespeare to fit their times. Seattle Shakespeare Company is presenting one of those works: a Salvadoran-American adaptation of Hamlet called house of sueños, by Meme García.

Theater played a significant role in the blossoming of Black American arts and culture of the 1920s and ’30s. Scholar Freda Scott Giles tells us how the artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance regarded the Bard.

Naomi Miller’s novel Imperfect Alchemist is about one of early modern England’s most significant literary figures: poet, playwright, translator, and scientist Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

Based on Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, Harvard’s Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson thought he knew how Game of Thrones would play out. But he discovered different similarities, like the way that both translate the history of the Wars of the Roses into other popular genres.

In Shakespeare’s time, new scientific discoveries and mathematical concepts were upending the way people looked at their world. Dr. Natalie Elliot shares how Shakespeare interpreted the scientific innovations of the early modern period in his works.

After playing Hal in Henry IV, Part 1 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, actor John Tufts wrote a cookbook, Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table. He shares how to make a pork pasty inspired by Titus Andronicus and the 17th-century chef Robert May.

For most of the 1700s, Shakespeare was considered a very good playwright, but in the 1800s, he became a prophet. The Victorians believed his works offered religious revelations. Scholar Charles LaPorte examines this moment in literary and religious history.

What does it mean to read a play like Titus Andronicus with questions of race in mind? Scholar David Sterling Brown, who has written extensively about that play, discusses the ways that such a reading reveals an entire dimension of racial imagery and racial violence.

The Show Must Go Online creatively uses the everyday facts of life in a pandemic—living rooms, laptops, and, of course, Zoom—to bring actors from around the world together in innovative performances of Shakespeare’s plays. And it all started with one tweet from actor Robert Myles.