Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

In 2015, a new musical called "Something Rotten!" opened on Broadway. The plot: Two brothers living in England in 1595 have had their playwriting careers upended by the arrival of a new guy from Strat...

7 Mar 201732min

A few months ago, Oxford University Press decided that in the New Oxford Shakespeare, the plays Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 would no longer be listed as having been written by Shakespeare alone. Inste...

21 Feb 201735min

Starting in the 1930s, people began sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy—addressed to Juliet. In 2014, a lovelorn Canadian high school teacher traveled to Verona over...

7 Feb 201732min

When we think of Shakespeare in the American West, Hollywood immediately comes to mind, but this podcast also takes us back to the California Gold Rush and the Americans who brought Shakespeare with t...

24 Jan 201735min

Since 2002, Gregory and Jeffery Ameen Qaiyum, better known as G.Q. and J.A.Q – the Q Brothers – have been using hip-hop to adapt and update the plays of William Shakespeare. At the time we recorded th...

10 Jan 201726min

Since 2002, a major organization in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, has supported an archaeological dig on the former grounds of a house called “New Place.” New Place was one of...

13 Des 201633min

While print sales of adult fiction are down in the last decade, the juvenile market – which includes young adult literature or "YA" – has actually gone up 40 percent. In this episode, two YA authors t...

29 Nov 201631min

There are a surprising number of characters in Shakespeare who propose or ask or even demand that someone tell their life’s story. (Think of Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio: “And in this harsh world d...

15 Nov 201628min