Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

In 2012, London’s Donmar Warehouse opened an all-female production of Julius Caesar, starring Dame Harriet Walter as Brutus and directed by Tony Award-nominated director Phyllida Lloyd. The production...

2 Apr 201935min

In 1994, Deborah Harkness was doing research at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library when she stumbled across the Book of Soyga, a long-lost manuscript treatise on magic that once belonged to Elizabet...

19 Mar 201935min

How do actors do what they do? How do they stir up emotions, both in themselves and in us as we watch them? Joseph Roach’s 1985 book The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting examined how...

5 Mar 201934min

In a novel just released in the US, author and longtime BBC radio host Simon Mayo tells an amazing—but true—story: that England’s first all-black production of Romeo and Juliet was staged by Black Ame...

19 Feb 201930min

Actor Edwin Booth was one of the 19th century’s biggest stars. One of the illegitimate sons of equally-famous actor Junius Brutus Booth, he made thousands of dollars touring America’s grandest theater...

5 Feb 201933min

Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when she was cast in Franco Zeffirelli’s "Romeo and Juliet." When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted Hussey and her Romeo, Leonard Whiting, to global s...

22 Jan 201934min

In 1956, Duke Ellington gave a series of concerts at Ontario, Canada’s Stratford Festival. Afterward, festival staff asked the legendary composer—at that point, one of jazz’s elder statesmen—if he’d c...

8 Jan 201931min

Imagine getting the chance to interview Jude Law, Maxine Peake, Adrian Lester, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, and Nicholas Hytner about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What would you ask? Would you want to...

12 Des 201833min