Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

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Stephen Greenblatt on Shakespeare's Life Stories Nov 15, 2016

Show notes

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 draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story.”) While that may not seem surprising on the face of it – Shakespeare was a storyteller after all – this idea of re-imagining your life so that it tells a story was not a common one in Shakespeare’s time. In this episode of Shakespeare Unlimited, Harvard University’s Stephen Greenblatt expands upon the talk he gave earlier this year for the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Anniversary Lecture Series, about how Shakespeare shapes characters and narratives. He also explores how the French Renaissance writer Montaigne influenced Shakespeare, and how Shakespeare pushed back on some of Montaigne’s ideas. Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of – among other books – "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" and "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern." Professor Greenblatt was interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published November 15, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. “Teach him how to tell my story” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had help from Professor Greenblatt's assistant, Aubrey Everett; from Anna Steinbock in the Harvard Office of Public Affairs & Communications and from Jeff Peters and the staff of the Marketplace studios in Los Angeles. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/stephen-greenblatt

Shakespeare and Girlhood Nov 01, 2016

Show notes

How does Shakespeare portray girls and girlhood in his plays, and what do those portrayals tell us about life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England? Our guest for this Shakespeare Unlimited episode, Deanne Williams of York University in Toronto, is the author of Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood, published in 2014. She is interviewed by Neva Grant. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published November 1, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Why, here's a girl!” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had technical help from the News Operations Staff at NPR in Washington, DC. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/girlhood

Shakespeare in Sign Language Oct 18, 2016

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Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, is the world’s only university designed to be barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students. For more than 150 years, its students have been performing Shakespeare without spoken words. This month, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s nationwide First Folio tour stops at Gallaudet, which also has a companion exhibition called “First Folio: Eyes on Shakespeare,” curated by Jill Bradbury, a Gallaudet English professor. In this podcast she takes us on a tour of the exhibition and of the world of Shakespeare in sign language. Transcript here: http://www.folger.edu/sites/default/files/ShaxUnlimited_Gallaudet_Transcript.pdf Jill Bradbury is interviewed by Neva Grant. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published October 18, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Altered much upon the hearing it,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had help from Kaitlin Luna, Gallaudet’s Coordinator of Media and Public Relations. Jill Bradbury’s sign language interpreter during the interview was Loriel Dutton. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/sign-language-gallaudet

Shakespeare in Solitary Oct 04, 2016

Show notes

For ten years, Laura Bates, a professor at Indiana State University, taught Shakespeare to a group of inmates considered the worst of the worst – men incarcerated in the solitary confinement unit at Indiana’s Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. These are, for the most part, prisoners considered so dangerous they were kept apart, even from the other prisoners. Every week, Professor Bates would drive out to the prison, make her way over to solitary confinement and sit down in a space in between the cells of these men to discuss Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Richard II. She wrote about her experiences in a book titled "Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard." Laura Bates is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. This Shakespeare Unlimited episode, "How I May Compare This Prison Where I Live Unto The World" was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. Audio of the inmates Laura worked with was provided by Indiana State’s Video Production Manager, Tracy Ford. It was edited by Ciara Gillan. We had additional help from Mike Paskash and Casey Zakin at WFIU, Indiana Public Media and Bill Lancz at Marketplace Studios in Los Angeles. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/solitary-prison

Anecdotal Shakespeare Sep 20, 2016

Show notes

The curses associated with the Scottish play. Using a real skull for the Yorick scene in "Hamlet." Over the centuries, these and other fascinating theatrical anecdotes have attached themselves to the plays of William Shakespeare. Many of these stories have been told and re-told, over and over, century after century – with each new generation inserting the names of new actors into the story and telling the story as if it just occurred. So “One night David Garrick was backstage” becomes, “So one night Edmund Kean was backstage” which then becomes, “So one night Richard Burton was backstage.” And so on. Our guest, Paul Menzer, is a professor and the director of the Shakespeare and Performance graduate program at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. His book "Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History" was published by Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare in 2015 He was interviewed by Neva Grant. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published September 20, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. “Truths Would Be Tales, Where Now Half Tales Be Truths” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had technical help from the News Operations Staff at NPR in Washington, DC. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/actor-anecdotes

How Shakespeare's First Folio Became a Star Sep 06, 2016

Show notes

Today, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, printed in 1623, can sell for millions of dollars. But the First Folio wasn’t always valued so highly. In this podcast episode, two experts in the First Folio and the book trade, Adam Hooks and Dan De Simone, chart the rise of the First Folio—how and when this book became a cultural icon with such a dizzying price tag. Adam Hooks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa and author of “Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade.” Dan De Simone is the Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library. They were interviewed by Neva Grant. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published September 6, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. “A Volume Of Enticing Lines” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had technical help from Jim Davies, Chief Engineer at Iowa Public Radio in Iowa City and the News Operations Staff at NPR in Washington, DC. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/how-first-folio-became-a-star

Elizabethan Medicine Aug 23, 2016

Show notes

Being a patient in Shakespeare’s time was an adventure. You might be told to drink liquid gold or syrup of violets. You might undergo a violent purgation to take the bad humors out of your body. They might draw blood from your ankle or your arm. But while these prescriptions seem laughable today, elements of the thinking they were based on have come all the way down to us in the 21st century. That thinking, though it might seem unrelated to Shakespeare's stories, is surprisingly present in his writing. Neva Grant interviews Gail Kern Paster and Barbara Traister about medicine in the era when Shakespeare was writing. Gail Kern Paster is the Folger’s director emerita, and Barbara Traister is professor emeritus of English at Lehigh University and the author of “The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman.” From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published August 23, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. “I Know My Physic Will Work With Him” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had technical help from the News Operations Staff at NPR in Washington, DC. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/elizabethan-medicine

American Moor Aug 09, 2016

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"Othello" is the story of a tragic murder and suicide involving a dark-skinned general and his aristocratic, white-skinned bride. Who should direct it? Who’s “allowed” to? What if a white director and the actor he’s cast as Othello simply do not see eye-to-eye on the play’s subtext, the Moor’s motivations, and what the audience is supposed to take away from the production? That conflict is at the heart of a one-man show currently being performed around the country called "American Moor." In it, a black actor – the play’s author, Keith Hamilton Cobb – stands on stage and addresses an invisible, white director who simply does not “get” Othello. Their disagreement allows for a searing exploration of the gulf between black and white Americans that some like to believe simply does not exist. Keith Hamilton Cobb is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published August 9, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Is This the Noble Moor?”, was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had help from Bill Lancz at the Marketplace Studios in Los Angeles. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/american-moor

The Food of Shakespeare's World Jul 26, 2016

Show notes

This episode shifts slightly from our usual intense focus on Shakespeare. Instead, we are talking about the world that he inhabited, or at least a small part of that world: the kitchen. Kitchens, and what goes on in them, come up in Shakespeare’s plays with surprising frequency, whether directly or, more often, obliquely. Our guest is Wendy Wall, an English professor at Northwestern University and director of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Her 2015 book Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen explores household recipes and what they tell us about English culture when Shakespeare was writing. She is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published July 26, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “You Will Hie You Home to Dinner,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had help from Allyssa Kaitlyn Pollard in the Northwestern University Media Relations Department and Jeff Peters at the studios of Marketplace in Los Angeles. http://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/food-wendy-wall

Recreating the Boydell Gallery Jul 12, 2016

Show notes

In the decades after Shakespeare's death, his works temporarily fell out of favor. His renaissance is usually credited to actor-manager David Garrick, who staged a Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769. Riding Garrick's coattails, an artistic entrepreneur named John Boydell later opened one of England's first art galleries, devoted to paintings of scenes from Shakespeare plays. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery has now been recreated online. Our guest is Janine Barchas, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin and curator of the Folger's upcoming exhibition, "Will & Jane." Barchas led the team that reconstructed Boydell's gallery as a website. We talked with her about the 18th-century Shakespeare craze, how Boydell capitalized on it, and the detective work required to recreate his gallery. Janine Barchas is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. You can see the digital Boydell Gallery at www.whatjanesaw.org From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published July 12, 2016. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Painting is Welcome,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French is the web producer. We had help from Jacob Weiss at Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) at the University of Texas at Austin and Bill Lancz at the studios of Marketplace in Los Angeles.

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