Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

The former Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director joins us to talk about where to start with Shakespeare, directing Kenneth Branagh’s big break, and his new book.

Sir Ian McKellen tells us about some of his most famous roles: playing Macbeth opposite Dame Judi Dench, King Richard III with a screenplay he co-wrote, and Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings films.

Sir Ian McKellen played Hamlet in his thirties, and again in his eighties. He gives us his take on the Melancholy Dane.

The Elizabethan period marked an unusually rich moment for theories of consciousness and for the representation of thought in literature, says scholar Helen Hackett.

Adams talks with host Barbara Bogaev about how he turned a five-act play into a two-act opera—which scenes got the hook, new lines written in the style of the Bard, and what Shakespeare may have thought of the play’s characters.

Composer Brett Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn talk about adapting Hamlet to create an opera that subverts expectations and takes audiences inside the minds of Hamlet and Ophelia.

Dr. Irena Makaryk explores the ways Ukrainians used Shakespeare’s plays to confirm the value and existence of Ukrainian culture. She also examined how the Russians—first the Czars, and then the Soviets—repressed Ukrainian theater.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes that theater holds a “mirror up to nature.” In his new book, Princeton professor Leonard Barkan tells us that when he reads Shakespeare, it holds a mirror up to Leonard Barkan.

In 1921, Asta Nielsen, one of the world’s biggest movie stars, had just formed her own production company, and decided to open it up by playing Hamlet. Plenty of women had done that on the stage, but Nielsen’s performance had a twist.

English women didn’t act on London’s professional stages until the 1660s. But Pamela Allen Brown argues that despite this, star actresses from Italy altered both plays and playing in a process that began in the 1570s, when commedia dell’arte troupes first set foot in London.

An Argentine woman translates A Midsummer Night’s Dream while incessantly taping travel postcards to a wall. Two Argentine actresses vie for the same role in Measure for Measure. An actress in Buenos Aires seduces her colleague while rehearsing a scene for Twelfth Night. These scenes all come from the films of Matías Piñeiro.

While the names of the many of Shakespeare’s male editors are well-known, up until now there has been little to nothing written about another group of Shakespeare editors: women. Molly Yarn discusses Elizabeth Inchbald, Laura Valentine, Charlotte Stopes, and their editorial sisters.