Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited20 Jul 2022

The Robben Island Shakespeare, with David Schalkwyk (Rebroadcast)

While Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on South Africa's Robben Island, one of the other political prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam, managed to retain a copy of Shakespeare's complete works. Venkatrathnam secretly circulated the book to many of his fellow prisoners—including Mandela—asking them to sign their names next to their favorite passages. As South African Shakespeare scholar David Schalkwyk explains to interviewer Rebecca Sheir, there is something special about "a book that had passed through the hands of the people who had saved my country." Schalkwyk shares some personal history and reveals what Shakespeare might have meant to the men who signed the Robben Island Shakespeare. David Schalkwyk is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He previously served as director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Plays, Literature and the Touch of the Real; and Shakespeare, Love and Service. His book about the Robben Island Shakespeare is titled Hamlet’s Dreams. It was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Originally published in 2013, and rebroadcast July 19, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Cowards Die Many Times before Their Deaths; The Valiant Never Taste of Death but Once," was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(309)

The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, with Paul Menzer

How do you write a “complete” life of Shakespeare when very little complete information about his life exists? Four centuries after Shakespeare’s death, the legends that have grown up around him have ...

22 Sep 35min

The Bard in the Borderlands

In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately...

8 Sep 33min

Shakespeare and the Law, with Len Niehoff

If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of ques...

25 Aug 36min

Stratford Festival's Antoni Cimolino

Near the end of The Tempest, Prospero vows to retire from practicing the “rough magic” he has mastered, to break his magical staff and drown his spellbooks. After 14 seasons as Artistic Director of Ca...

11 Aug 33min

Shakespeare and Stephen King, with Caroline Bicks

Imagine being able to dig through Shakespeare’s manuscripts and ask him about his writing process. Did King Lear survive in the first draft? What if Hamlet originally said, “To live or not to live?” ...

28 Jul 37min

Shakespeare's Margaret, with Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern

It’s been more than 400 years since she first appeared on stage, and she’s still controversial. Margaret of Anjou appears in not one, not two, but four of Shakespeare’s plays—Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and ...

14 Jul 35min

Scholars in Shakespeare, with Sean Keilen

Shakespeare famously never attended university. But not only has his work inspired generations of scholarship, his plays, too, are filled with scholarly characters. Shakespeare, it seems, took an inte...

30 Jun 35min

The Six Loves of James I, with Gareth Russell

“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is ...

16 Jun 40min