Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

There’s no doubt you’ve seen images of Shakespeare. You imagine that you have a pretty good idea of what Shakespeare looked like. Scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones invites you to question your assumptions and take a new look.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 37 Shakespeare adaptations are a proud tradition.  Prokofiev turned Romeo and Juliet into a ballet.  Verdi turned Macbeth and Othello into operas, and The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night have been converted by Hollywood into…

Henry Clay Folger paid a world record price for a book—not once, but twice—as he became the world’s leading collector of Shakespeare First Folios. Andrea Mays, author of The Millionaire and the Bard, shares some of the fascinating details of his life and how he assembled the world’s largest Shakespeare collection.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 35 Shakespeare and his plays are woven deeply into the culture of the Caribbean, both white and black. Even after centuries of British colonial rule came to an end, Shakespeare endured.  There’s a long tradition in the…

For the many of Shakespeare’s fans, his works are brought to life by the actors and actresses who speak the lines. What makes a Shakespearean actor truly great? Scholar Sir Stanley Wells considers the most outstanding Shakespeare performers past and present.

The majority of Shakespeare’s plays call for singing, but while we have the lyrics, sometimes we don’t know the musical notes. David Lindley, professor emeritus of literature and music at the University of Leeds, talks about how directors filled those musical gaps.

1606 was a critical year for Shakespeare, the year in which he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It was also a time in which James I faced internal political challenges that threatened to tear England apart.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 31 Just what exactly does it mean to edit the works of Shakespeare, particularly since we have no surviving manuscript copies? Why is it that new editions of the plays continue to be published? In this episode…

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…

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 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 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…