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.

Episoder(296)

Second Chances, Shakespeare, and Freud, with Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt

Second Chances, Shakespeare, and Freud, with Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt

The desire for a second chance provides the engine for many of Shakespeare’s plays. In their new book, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and psychologist Ad...

21 Mai 202435min

Mary Zimmerman on Adapting Ovid and Directing Shakespeare

Mary Zimmerman on Adapting Ovid and Directing Shakespeare

When Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was on Broadway in 2002, it won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel awards for best play. Zimmerman to...

7 Mai 202432min

Judi Dench On Seven Decades of Shakespeare, with Brendan O’Hea

Judi Dench On Seven Decades of Shakespeare, with Brendan O’Hea

In her new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Dame Judi  Dench and actor/director Brendan O'Hea chat about her long history with the Bard. On this episode, Dench and O'Hea join host Barbara...

23 Apr 202440min

Shakespeare and the Environment, with Todd Andrew Borlik

Shakespeare and the Environment, with Todd Andrew Borlik

Land enclosure. Wildlife management. Erosion. Pollution. Mining practices. Today, we’d call these environmental issues. But, hundreds of years before the modern environmental movement coalesced, these...

9 Apr 202433min

Ramie Targoff on Women Writers of the English Renaissance

Ramie Targoff on Women Writers of the English Renaissance

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents “Judith” Shakespeare, and concludes that...

26 Mar 202437min

Green World: Michelle Ephraim on Discovering Shakespeare and Reevaluating The Merchant of Venice

Green World: Michelle Ephraim on Discovering Shakespeare and Reevaluating The Merchant of Venice

In her new memoir, "Green World," Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim tells the story of how she came to Shakespeare relatively late in her education. Although she didn’t grow up with Shakespeare, Ep...

12 Mar 202433min

Eddie Izzard on Performing Hamlet Solo

Eddie Izzard on Performing Hamlet Solo

Eddie Izzard has a long record of dramatic roles. But it’s her decades of experience as a stand-up comedian that prepared Izzard for her recent solo shows—first Great Expectations, and now Hamlet at N...

27 Feb 202432min

Shakespeare and Disgust, with Bradley J. Irish

Shakespeare and Disgust, with Bradley J. Irish

Maybe there really was something rotten in Denmark. On this episode, we talk with Bradley J. Irish about disgust in Shakespeare. In his new book, Irish identifies the emotion, which combines physical ...

13 Feb 202434min

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