Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life. Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than presenting clear answers, Shakespeare lets these ideas collide on stage. In this episode, Womersley explains how Shakespeare’s plays become what he calls “crucibles” for thinking. As characters struggle with competing values and impossible choices, audiences go on that journey with them—testing ideas, reconsidering assumptions, and confronting the same enduring dilemmas that have shaped human thought for centuries.

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400 Years of Shakespeare's First Folio, with Emma Smith

400 Years of Shakespeare's First Folio, with Emma Smith

The First Folio—the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays—hit bookstores 400 years ago this November. Emma Smith of Oxford University tells us just what this famous book has been up to for th...

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The Bloomsbury Group and Shakespeare, with Marjorie Garber

The Bloomsbury Group and Shakespeare, with Marjorie Garber

We talk with Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber about how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury Group made Shakespeare their own. Garber’s most recent book—her twentieth—is Shakespeare in Bloomsbury...

24 Okt 202331min

Patrick Stewart on a Life Shaped by Shakespeare

Patrick Stewart on a Life Shaped by Shakespeare

Sir Patrick Stewart joins us on the podcast to talk about how Shakespeare has shaped his life. Stewart tells host Barbara Bogaev about his Yorkshire youth, his audition for the Royal Shakespeare Compa...

10 Okt 202331min

Michael Patrick Thornton on Learning to Breathe Again with Shakespeare

Michael Patrick Thornton on Learning to Breathe Again with Shakespeare

Sometimes, the beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry takes your breath away. In the case of today’s guest, Shakespeare gave him his breath back. You may recognize actor Michael Patrick Thornton from his rol...

26 Sep 202329min

The Many Lives of John Donne with Katherine Rundell

The Many Lives of John Donne with Katherine Rundell

We talk with author Katherine Rundell about the extraordinary life —or should we say lives? — of John Donne, who wrote some of the 17th century’s most complex and intellectually dazzling poetry. Runde...

12 Sep 202334min

Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steve Mentz

Shakespeare and the Ocean, with Steve Mentz

Today, we sail the seven seas with Shakespeare. In addition to being a dedicated swimmer, Steve Mentz is a professor at St. John’s University. His books, including 2009’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’...

29 Aug 202333min

Farah Karim-Cooper on The Great White Bard

Farah Karim-Cooper on The Great White Bard

Can you love Shakespeare and be an antiracist? Farah Karim-Cooper's new book, The Great White Bard, explores the language of race and difference in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicu...

15 Aug 202332min

Isabella Hammad on Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad on Enter Ghost

A Palestinian production of Hamlet in the West Bank is the backdrop for Isabella Hammad’s new novel, Enter Ghost. Hammad’s first novel, the beautiful and sprawling The Parisian, won international ac...

1 Aug 202332min

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