Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

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 presenting clear answers, Shakespeare lets these ideas collide on stage. In this episode, Womersley explains how Shakespeare’s plays become what he calls “crucibles” for thinking. As characters struggle with competing values and impossible choices, audiences go on that journey with them—testing ideas, reconsidering assumptions, and confronting the same enduring dilemmas that have shaped human thought for centuries.

Jaksot(298)

Mat Osman's The Ghost Theatre Imagines the Lives of Elizabethan London's Child Actors

Mat Osman's The Ghost Theatre Imagines the Lives of Elizabethan London's Child Actors

Mat Osman's new novel, The Ghost Theatre, takes us flying over the rooftops of Elizabethan London and down into the gritty lives of its child actors. A historical novel set in a vibrant and sensuously...

18 Heinä 202331min

Adrian Lester on Playing Rosalind, Henry V, Othello, and Hamlet

Adrian Lester on Playing Rosalind, Henry V, Othello, and Hamlet

We could listen to Adrian Lester talk about acting all day… but he's a busy man, so we’ll settle for this 37 minute episode. The actor joins us to discuss some of his most famous performances, includ...

4 Heinä 202336min

Greg Doran on Forty Years of Directing Shakespeare

Greg Doran on Forty Years of Directing Shakespeare

On today’s episode, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s former Artistic Director takes a look back at four decades of staging Shakespeare. Greg Doran’s career as a Shakespearean director began in the late...

20 Kesä 202335min

David West Read on & Juliet

David West Read on & Juliet

Start with Shakespeare’s "star-crossed" lovers and fold in the songs of Swedish pop hitmaker Max Martin… what do you get? The hit Broadway musical & Juliet, currently running at the Stephen Sondheim T...

6 Kesä 202329min

Robert O'Hara on Directing Richard III

Robert O'Hara on Directing Richard III

Robert O’Hara joins us to talk about directing last year’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III, starring Danai Gurira of Marvel's "Black Panther." He tells us about gathering a diverse c...

23 Touko 202333min

Publishing Shakespeare's First Folio, with Chris Laoutaris

Publishing Shakespeare's First Folio, with Chris Laoutaris

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Eighteen of those plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, h...

9 Touko 202329min

Lolita Chakrabarti on Adapting Hamnet for the Stage

Lolita Chakrabarti on Adapting Hamnet for the Stage

Lolita Chakrabarti is the playwright of Red Velvet, about 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge, and has adapted Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi for the stage. Now, s...

25 Huhti 202335min

James Ijames on Fat Ham

James Ijames on Fat Ham

Hamlet has been adapted, retold, and reinvented countless ways. But you’ve never seen a version of Hamlet quite like James Ijames’s Fat Ham, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and is now play...

11 Huhti 202332min

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