The Many Lives of John Donne with Katherine Rundell

Here’s the assignment. Fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, with an a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g rhyme scheme. Now: add Taylor Swift. It’s astounding and gratifying that Shakespeare—a 450-year-old ...

21 Aug 201824min

Joe Papp was responsible for some of modern American theater's most iconic institutions: New York City's free Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater. The whole idea of "Off-Broadway." We spoke wi...

7 Aug 201835min

In 2011, Ben Steinfeld and Noah Brody, co-directors of New York’s Fiasco Theater, were invited to an assisted living facility and nursing home just outside New York City to work with its residents on ...

24 Jul 201832min

What did everyday life look like for women throughout Tudor society? A new social history, "The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton," introduces us not only to the restrictions, but also t...

10 Jul 201832min

“How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? That’s a deeply unsettling question that Shakespeare grappled with again and again.” Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, "Tyran...

26 Jun 201837min

Over the course of three summers in the 1950s, Arthur Lithgow, Meredith Dallas, and a troupe of actors they’d gathered performed every single one of Shakespeare plays, in rep, at the Antioch Shakespea...

12 Jun 201840min

In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, "Julius Caesar," set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, recen...

29 Mai 201834min

London in the time of William Shakespeare was a city in the midst of a phenomenal metamorphosis. During the course of Shakespeare’s professional life, the city experienced a meteoric transition, rocke...

15 Mai 201831min