Shakespeare Unlimited podcast
William Shakespeare and his works are woven throughout our global culture, from theater, music, and films to new scholarship, education, amazing discoveries, and more. In our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, Shakespeare opens a window into topics ranging from the American West, to the real history of Elizabethan street fighting, to interviews with Shakespearean stars. As you’ll hear, he turns up in surprising places, too—including outer space. Join us for a “no limits” tour of the connections between Shakespeare, his works, and our world.
Shakespeare Not Stirred
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 30 Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas is the creation of two English professors who combined their love of the cocktail hour and their love of Shakespeare to write a collection of Bard-inspired cocktail and…
Great Shakespeareans
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 29 If you were to make a list of the people who have left an enduring imprint on how the world interprets, understands, and receives Shakespeare, who would you choose? About a decade ago, Peter Holland, the…
Shakespeare, Chaucer, and The Tabard Inn
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 28 What if Shakespeare and his friends had gotten together and carved their names on the wall of an inn made famous by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? In 2015, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Dr. Martha Carlin…
Shakespeare in Hong Kong
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 27 Hong Kong, a former British colony, has been staging and teaching Shakespeare plays for nearly 150 years. In this episode from our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, we see how Shakespeare is stretched to tell a story of…
Shakespeare on Film
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 26 For most of us, “seeing Shakespeare” means experiencing live actors in a theater. But for more than 100 years, Shakespeare’s words, plots, settings and characters have also been brought to life on film. Shakespeare on film…
Shakespeare's France and Italy
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 25 Shakespeare’s plays are well stocked with merchants of Venice, gentlemen of Verona, lords and ladies of France, and other foreign characters. But what did he—and his audiences—really know about such distant places and people? In this…
Elizabethan Street Fighting
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 24 From the duels in Romeo and Juliet to a brutal mob in Julius Caesar, street fighting transforms several of Shakespeare’s plays. How much, though, does it reflect (or differ from) the mean streets of his day?…
Myths About Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 23 Even if you’re not a Shakespeare scholar, there are things you have learned about Shakespeare and his plays throughout your life – that it’s bad luck to say the name of “the Scottish play” or that…
Recounting Shakespeare's Life
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 22 What do we know about Shakespeare’s life? The answer: Not as much as we would like to. As much or as little, in other words, as we would about any middle-class Englishman of his time. This…
Designing Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 21 There’s an old Broadway saying (sometimes attributed to Richard Rodgers) that “No one ever walked out of a theater humming the scenery.” Nevertheless, costume and scenery designers can be vital to the success of a play.…
African Americans and Shakespeare
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 20 African American engagement with Shakespeare goes back a long way—maybe even farther than you’d imagine. And like so much else surrounding American race relations, African American performance of Shakespeare is inextricably linked to the experiences of…
Shakespeare in Black and White
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 19 In the second of two episodes about Black Americans and Shakespeare, we talk with scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson about the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s: from Reconstruction, through…