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    Arts

    Shakespeare For All

    Shakespeare For All is an engaging, accessible introduction to the life and work of William Shakespeare, featuring world-class scholars and performers.
    You’ll learn who Shakespeare was and what historical events shaped his writing. You’ll be guided through his most popular poems and plays by leading scholars, actors, and interpreters of Shakespeare. And you’ll find the tools you need to become an interpreter of Shakespeare yourself and join in the ongoing global discussion his works have inspired.
    The first course offers a tour through Shakespeare’s moment in history and his life. You’ll also discover strategies for understanding Shakespeare’s stories, characters, and language across his plays.
    At the heart of the series are courses on Shakespeare’s most thought-provoking and beloved plays. Each begins with a detailed summary of the story. Then, a top Shakespeare scholar takes you on a deep dive into the play’s characters, language, and most important questions. Finally, you’ll hear Shakespeare’s language come to life, with original performances from professional Shakespearean actors.
    Shakespeare For All also features a course on Shakespeare’s sonnets — his sequence of 154 short poems that explore revolutionary new directions within the conventional poetry of love — and a bonus course on Game of Thrones and Shakespeare, “The Wooden O and the Iron Throne.”
    Except where otherwise noted, the texts used for this course are from Shakespeare’s Plays, Sonnets and Poems, from The Folger Shakespeare, ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.
    Shakespeare For All is a Lyceum original production.
    Team:
    Zachary Davis (Executive Producer)
    Zachary Davis is the president of Lyceum and host of Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large. He has a graduate degree from Harvard Divinity School and is the founder and organizer of the Sound Education conference.
    Jemma Deer (Associate Producer and Narrator)
    Jemma Deer is a Researcher in Residence at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, currently working on a book on extinction. She also hosts and produces EcoCast, the official podcast of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
    Maria Devlin McNair (Course Creator and Managing Producer)
    Maria Devlin McNair received her PhD from Harvard University in English literature with a specialization in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. She is a writer and Managing Producer for the Harvard Divinity School podcast Ministry of Ideas. She is currently developing a book project on ethics and Renaissance comedy.
    Jack Pombriant (Composer and Sound Designer)
    Jack Pombriant is the associate producer of Writ Large. He received his BM from Berklee College of Music, where he studied music composition and production. He is also a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where he studied radio and podcast production.

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    Latest Episodes:
    Measure For Measure Part 1 - The Story Jul 28, 2022
    Show notes

    Measure for Measure is a comedy that goes places most comedies don’t go. Like other comedies, it ends with marriages, social reconciliation, and the promise of new life. But along the way, love, sexuality, and procreation are linked more closely to death than to life. Measure for Measure confronts the besetting sins of human nature – greed, love of power, the tendency toward sexual lust and exploitation — to ask deep political and philosophical questions. How do you balance human appetites with social order? How do you build a political system that constrains its citizens without crushing them? How can the transcendental ideals of justice and mercy be reflected in the human governance of flawed societies? In this course, you’ll learn the story and context of Measure for Measure and discover how the play explores these perennial questions within one of Shakespeare’s most moving human stories.

    In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. This episode introduces the play’s key themes and historical context and recounts the story using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.

    The Taming of the Shrew Part 3 - The Language Jul 28, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 3 features close-readings of two key speeches, one from Petruchio and one from Katherine. These speeches are performed in two different ways: as originally written, and with the gender pronouns reversed as they were in the 2019 RSC production of Taming, whose lead actors perform the speeches. These double performances help us reflect on our own reactions to the play’s provocative take on gender.

    Speeches and Performers:

    • Petruchio/Petruchia, Act 4, “Thus have I politicly begun my reign …” (Claire Price) (two versions)
    • Katherine, Act 5, “Fie, fie! Unknit that threat’ning unkind brow” (Joseph Arkley) (two versions)


    The Taming of the Shrew Part 2 - The Characters Jul 28, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 2 begins by exploring the Katherine-Petruchio relationship in greater depth, examining the most positive and the most negative possible interpretations of it and the different ways of understanding the “taming” plot. It goes on to discuss how Shakespeare’s first audiences might have reacted to the play (and why they might not have reacted in the way we expect), and how modern productions stage, adapt, and re-imagine the story, deploying the interpretive freedom that, in Professor Smith’s view, “really is Shakesepare.”

    The Taming of the Shrew Part 1 - The Story Jul 28, 2022
    Show notes

    The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s most controversial and ambiguous comedies. Written in the early 1590s, it purports to tell the story of how a “shrew,” the strong-willed Katherine, is “tamed” by the even stronger-willed fortune hunter Petruchio. Petruchio marries Katherine and, in the eyes of onlookers, seem to “kill[] her in her own humour.” But the play leaves us wondering whether Katherine really is tamed – and whether Petruchio, Shakespeare, or Shakespeare’s own audiences really wanted her to be. As much as this play draws critical fire, it continues to draw artists’ and audiences’ attention as we return to this play again and again to ask our own questions and make our own statements about gender and gender roles. In this course, you’ll learn the story of The Taming of the Shrew, explore the relationship between Katherine and Petruchio and the many possible ways of interpreting it, and discuss what the play reveals about what we need from theatre and from Shakespeare.

    In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. You’ll see how Shakespeare embeds, within the text and physical action of the play, crucial questions about Katherine and Petruchio that the text itself doesn’t answer. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.

    Richard II Part 3 - The Language Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 3 features close-readings of several significant speeches and scenes. We hear from Richard’s opponents and from Richard himself as he narrates his way – dazzlingly – into his new tragic identity.

    Speeches and Performers:

    • John of Gaunt, Act 2, “Methinks I am a prophet …” (Anton Lesser)
    • Richard II, Act 3, “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground …” (Keith Hamilton Cobb and Donald Sumpter)
    • Richard II and Bolingbroke, Act 4, “Give me the crown …” (Danann McAleer)


    Richard II Part 2 - The Characters Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 2 explores the play’s language and imagery and how it reflects the political plot. It discusses the political strategies and goals of Bolingbroke and Richard to ask what the play reveals about power and why Richard seems to gain in power as a literary, tragic figure precisely as he loses power as king – and why Richard seems to desire this tragic fate. It concludes by looking at how Richard’s story has been marshaled as political propaganda and at the political questions that Shakespeare leaves ambiguous: how should we regard Richard’s fate?

    Richard II Part 1 - The Story Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    Richard II is at once a masterwork of poetry and a bloody account of political plotting. In the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a series of eight plays based on English chronicle history. Richard II is the first play chronologically in that series, telling the story of a king whose fall helped set in motion the political contentions and civil wars for decades to come. In 1399, Richard II was deposed by his cousin Bolingbroke, who became King Henry IV. But in Shakespeare’s play, what Richard loses in political power, he gains in dramatic power. In this course, you’ll learn the story and historical context behind Richard II, explore the complex political dimensions depicted in this transition of power, and see how Shakespeare develops this unusual protagonist who wants to be a tragic character.

    In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Michael Dobson, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. You’ll learn the historical background behind the play and start to explore the play’s central ambiguities concerning Richard’s political moves and Richard’s own character. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.

    Troilus and Cressida Part 2 - The Sources and the Legend Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 2 begins with a closer examination of the play’s major sources, especially Homer’s Iliad, a story of war, and the medieval poet Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a story of love. It goes to examine how Shakespeare undermines these literary traditions, particularly by showing the overlap of love and war in this play — how erotic relationships became the field on which men play out their rivalries with each other. It then analyzes the striking differences between Chaucer’s depiction of Cressida and Shakespeare’s, to conclude by asking why Shakespeare would create such a corrosive, demystifying revision of this central cultural story — and why it’s so valuable for us today.

    Troilus and Cressida Part 3 - The Language Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    Part 3 features close-readings of three key speeches that uniquely reflect the corruption and cynicism of this play-world – either in lamenting it, or increasing it.

    Speeches and Performers:

    • Ulysses, Act 1, “Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down …” (Rob Myles)
    • Ulysses, Act 1, “The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns …” (Rob Myles)
    • Pandarus, Act 5, “A goodly medicine for my aching bones…” (Austin Tichenor)



    Troilus and Cressida Part 1 - The Story Jul 27, 2022
    Show notes

    The story of the Trojan War is one of the oldest in Western civilization. Famously recounted by the ancient Greek poet Homer and the classical Roman poet Virgil, it was told and retold throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Many Troy traditions were available to Shakespeare when he set out to write his own Trojan tale – and in this shocking satire, he wages war against them all. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida intensifies the cynicism, wipes out the romance, and reverses the heroism found in earlier Troy tales. The result often proves unloveable – but in the decades since World War I, in the wake of military and political crises, its skeptical, satirical voice has also proved to be just the voice we need. In this course, you’ll learn the story of Troilus and Cressida, examine the literary traditions behind the play, and discover how and why Shakespeare twists those sources to create his one and only satire.

    In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. This episode introduces the play’s literary context and its own satiric stance and recounts the story with the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.

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