Shakespeare and Ukraine, with Irena Makaryk
Director Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas’s 1920 Macbeth was the first production of a Shakespeare play in Ukraine. Kurbas staged the play in the midst of the famine and violence of the Russian Civil War: Lady ...
10 Maj 202232min
Leonard Barkan on Reading Shakespeare Reading Me
In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes that theater holds a “mirror up to nature.” In his new book, Princeton professor Leonard Barkan tells us that when he reads Shakespeare, it holds a mirror up to Leonard B...
26 Apr 202233min
Pamela Hutchinson on Asta Nielsen's Hamlet
In 1921, Asta Nielsen, one of the world’s biggest movie star in the world had just formed her own production company, and decided to open it up by playing Hamlet. Plenty of women had done that on the ...
12 Apr 202234min
How the Commedia Dell'Arte's Actresses Changed the Shakespearean Stage, with Pamela Allen Brown
English women didn’t act on London’s professional stages until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. But Dr. Pamela Allen Brown, author of The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage, argues that st...
29 Mars 202229min
Matías Piñeiro on His Shakespeare-Adjacent Films
An Argentine woman translates "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" while incessantly taping travel postcards to a wall. An actress in Buenos Aires seduces her colleague while rehearsing a scene for "Twelfth Ni...
15 Mars 202235min
Molly Yarn on Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors'
Over the centuries there have been hundreds of editions of Shakespeare’s plays: Small, inexpensive schoolbook copies of individual plays, massive, leatherbound editions of the complete works, and ever...
1 Mars 202234min
Stephen Marche on How Shakespeare Changed Everything
Even 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare’s influence is profound. But is it right to say that he changed everything? That the assertion Stephen Marche makes in his book "How Shakespeare Cha...
15 Feb 202230min
Black Women Shakespeareans, 1821 – 1960, with Joyce Green MacDonald
Between 1821 and 1960, it would have been vanishingly rare to see a Black woman onstage performing Shakespeare. In Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald’s chapter in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and...
1 Feb 202233min
