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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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