Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Billy Collins is one of America’s most well-known poets. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. His poetry collections frequently show up on bestseller lists, and his popular readings—three of which we’ve been lucky to host at the Folger—are warm and laughter-filled affairs. In a wide-ranging interview, Collins talks about humanizing Shakespeare and other literary titans, delves into his own work and inspirations, and reads from his newest collection, Musical Tables. He is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Billy Collins's new collection, Musical Tables, is available now from Random House. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published November 22, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Evermore Sound in Orlando and Andrew Fe

A director makes a play add up to more than the sum of its parts. That's something Adrian Noble knows as well as anyone. Noble has directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays, including Kenneth Branagh’s breakout performance as Henry V in 1984 at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He served as artistic director of the RSC from 1991 to 2002, and directed musicals like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on London’s West End as well as operas like Verdi’s Macbeth, Don Carlo, and Otello. Now, Noble has written a new book, How to Direct Shakespeare, a no-nonsense guide for directors confronting the challenge of staging Shakespeare’s texts. Noble writes that Shakespeare presents unique challenges for actors and directors — but that his plays also serve as excellent preparation for all other directing work. For those of us who aren’t directors, Noble’s book is full of things we can look out for the next time we read one of Shakespeare’s plays or watch it onstage. Adrian Noble is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Adrian No

In the second part of our special extended interview with Sir Ian McKellen, he tells us about some of his most famous roles: playing Macbeth opposite Dame Judi Dench, King Richard III with a screenplay he co-wrote, and Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings films. McKellen is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 25, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Rob Double at London Broadcast and Andrew Feliciano at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

He played Hamlet in his thirties… and again in his eighties. In between? Edgar, Romeo, Leontes, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Iago, Richard III, Prospero, and King Lear. Plus, of course, Magneto and Gandalf. On this episode, we talk with Sir Ian McKellan. Last year, he played Hamlet in an age-blind production of the play at the Theatre Royal Windsor, returning to the role for the first time since 1971. Then, at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, McKellen played Hamlet again, speaking the part alongside a ballet dancer in a production directed by Peter Schaufuss. Now, he’s is appearing as King Hamlet’s ghost in an essay film about the play called Hamlet Within. McKellen joined us from his home in East London for an extended conversation with Barbara Bogaev. In part 1 of our interview, we start by discussing the age-, gender-, and color-blind stage production of Hamlet he starred in last year, directed by Sean Mathias. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 11, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All ri

If you’ve ever been watching Hamlet and asked yourself, “What on earth is Hamlet thinking?!” you’re not alone. But to figure that out, you might have to figure out what Hamlet—and Shakespeare—think about what it means to think. That’s the argument University College London professor Helen Hackett makes in her new book, The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty, a wide-ranging study of the many conflicting ideas that Elizabethans had about their own minds. She concludes that the period marked an unusually rich moment for theories of consciousness and for the representation of thought in literature. Host Barbara Bogaev talks with Hackett about the four humors, anxiety about imagination, demonic possession, and more. Helen Hackett is a professor of English at University College London. Her book The Elizabethan Mind was published by Yale University Press earlier this year. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 27, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All right

Celebrated American composer John Adams’s newest opera takes its inspiration from Shakespeare. . Adams talks with host Barbara Bogaev about how he turned a five-act play into a two-act opera—which scenes got the hook, new lines written in the style of the Bard, and what Shakespeare may have thought of the play’s characters.  The Sunday, September 18, 2022 performance will be livestreamed at 2pm Pacific, and on-demand for 48 hours beginning Monday, September 19, 2022 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern time. Antony and Cleopatra is on stage September 10 through October 5, 2022. More information at . From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published September 12, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West

This summer marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their 2012 Julius Caesar was Britain’s first ever high-profile production of a Shakespeare play with an all-Black cast—a milestone that came 76 years after it was first done in the US and 15 years after it was first done in Canada. The production featured Paterson Joseph as Brutus, and he was so impressed by the experience that he wrote Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. The book takes an unflinching look at Joseph’s time at the RSC, both while working on Caesar and in the 1990s, when the son of St. Lucian parents found himself one of only four Black people in the building. He also writes about his early work, performing sharp and boldly reimagined Shakespeare with the Cheek by Jowl company; his thoughts about race in the British theater; the proper way to play Brutus; Received Pronunciation, and much more. In 2018, Joseph was at the National Black Theater in Harlem, performing his on

What if Shakespeare and his friends had gotten together and carved their names on the wall of an inn made famous by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? In 2015, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor Dr. Martha Carlin found an anecdote in a little-known, unpublished manuscript that suggests such a link between these two great English writers.   Unfortunately, the Tabard Inn burned down in the great Southwark fire of 1676, so there’s no way of knowing the truth for sure. But even if it only was hearsay, this Shakespeare graffiti story—and the alehouse-centric connection between two writers over 200 years apart that it suggests—captures the imagination. Carlin talks with Rebecca Sheir about the anonymous diarist who wrote the account and what might have drawn Shakespeare and his pals to the Tabard Inn. Dr. Martha Carlin is a professor of history in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. © Folger Shakespeare Library. T

While Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on South Africa's Robben Island, one of the other political prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam, managed to retain a copy of Shakespeare's complete works. Venkatrathnam secretly circulated the book to many of his fellow prisoners—including Mandela—asking them to sign their names next to their favorite passages. As South African Shakespeare scholar David Schalkwyk explains to interviewer Rebecca Sheir, there is something special about "a book that had passed through the hands of the people who had saved my country." Schalkwyk shares some personal history and reveals what Shakespeare might have meant to the men who signed the Robben Island Shakespeare. David Schalkwyk is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He previously served as director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is the author of Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Plays, Literature and the Touch of the Real; and Shakesp

Legendary director Peter Brook died last week at the age of 97. Brook was one of theater’s most influential directors. His 1970 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is among that play’s most lauded and best-known productions. His 1968 book The Empty Space is a classic of theater writing. Over the course of his career, he directed actors including John Gielgud, Glenda Jackson, Ben Kingsley, Adrian Lester, Vivienne Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Patrick Stewart, and Frances de la Tour, and won multiple Tony and Emmy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Prix Italia. When we spoke to Brook in 2019, his new play, Why?, co-written and co-directed by longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne, was about to kick off a tour of China, Italy, and Spain, and his newest book, Playing by Ear: Reflections on Sound and Music, had just been released. Brook spoke with Barbara Bogaev about his remarkable career, his illustrious collaborators, and the process of making theater. From the Shakespeare Un

Henry Clay Folger paid a world record price for a book—not once, but twice—as he became the world's leading collector of Shakespeare First Folios. The Folger Shakespeare Library celebrated its 90th birthday this past April. Did you ever wonder how all of our books got here?  We talk with economist and author Andrea Mays about The Millionaire and the Bard, her 2015 biography of Henry Clay Folger, who founded the Folger together with Emily Jordan Folger, his wife. Mays shares some of the fascinating financial and personal details of Folger's life: in particular, how he went about assembling the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. Mays is interviewed by Neva Grant. The Millionaire and the Bard was published by Simon & Schuster in 2015. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode, “Mine Own Library With Volumes That I Prize” was published November 18, 2015, and rebroadcast June 21, 2022. It was produced under the supervision of Garland Scot

Joe Papp was responsible for some of modern American theater's most iconic institutions: New York City's free Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater. The whole idea of "Off-Broadway." We spoke with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan about Papp's life and works, from his hardscabble childhood, through the frightening era of Joe McCarthy, to the founding of Shakespeare in the Park and The Public. Published in 2009, Turan's epic oral history of the early years of the New York Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theater is called Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. To create that book, he spent untold hours with Joe Papp and also talked with New York politicians, Broadway producers, and seemingly everyone else who helped Papp make Shakespeare in the Park a reality, including performers like James Earl Jones, George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Colleen Dewhurst, Tommy Lee Jones, and a Staten Island car-wash employee who would go on

A new opera version of Hamlet is onstage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera through June 9. Composer Brett Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn talk with host Barbara Bogaev about adapting the texts of the earliest editions of Hamlet to create a libretto that subverts expectations and composing orchestrations that take audiences inside the minds of Hamlet and Ophelia. The Saturday, June 4 performance of Hamlet will be transmitted live to movie theaters around the world via The Met’s Live in HD series. Watch it at a cinema near you. Brett Dean is the composer and Matthew Jocelyn is the librettist for Hamlet, which premiered at Britain’s Glyndebourne Festival in 2017. The opera is onstage at the Metropolitan Opera through June 9. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 24, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Sing Thee to Thy Rest,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the w

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 Macbeth fainted from hunger in the wings, and Kurbas used series of hand signals to warn the actors onstage that they were about to be shot at. Kurbas was one of the main subjects of “‘What's Past is Prologue’: Shakespeare and Canon Formation in Early Soviet Ukraine,” a presentation given by Dr. Irena Makaryk at Shakespeare and the Worlds of Communism, a 1996 conference sponsored by the Folger, Penn State University, and the Russian Embassy in Washington. The event looked at Shakespeare’s role in the formation of culture within the bloc of countries that had been allied with the newly-collapsed Soviet Union. Makaryk’s paper explored the ways Ukrainians used Shakespeare’s plays to assert the existence and value of Ukrainian culture. She also examined how the Russians—first the Czars, and then the Soviets—repress

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 Barkan—and that when you read Shakespeare, it holds up a mirror to you. When most of us read, Barkan reminds us, we bring our own experiences to the text, asking personal questions like “What about my life?” and “How does this make me feel?” His book Reading Shakespeare Reading Me combines memoir and literary criticism, analyzing ten Shakespeare plays and locating their parallels in the intimate details of his parents’ marriages and early lives, his coming of age as a gay man, and many of the deaths, loves, achievements, and disappointments that have made up his time on Earth. Leonard Barkan is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books including The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and the Culture of Europe fro

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 stage in the 19th century, but Nielsen’s performance had a twist. Inspired by a mysterious American’s quirky book, Nielsen decided to make a version of Hamlet where the lead character was born a woman, a fact that was kept secret from nearly all of the play’s characters for her entire life. We talk about this film and Nielsen’s remarkable career with Pamela Hutchinson, a writer and film historian who recently curated the British Film Institute’s Asta Nielsen film festival about Nielsen’s Hamlet. Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance writer, film historian, and curator. You can read her film writing in Sight & Sound, Criterion, and in The Guardian. She’s a regular on BBC radio. Her website, devoted to silent films, is Silent London, at silentlondon.co.uk. Visit the British Film Institute’s website at bfi.org.uk for i

Women didn’t act on London’s professional stages until after the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1661. But Dr. Pamela Allen Brown, author of The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage, believes that the movement towards women in the theater actually began in the 1570s, when Italy’s commedia dell’arte troupes first stepped set foot in London. The troupes featured something most English people hadn’t seen at that point: the Divina—a woman who played the Innamorata role, one of the two lovers in plays we’d characterize today as romantic comedies. English diplomats had seen the women who played these parts—who would later be called “divas”—but in the 1570s, divas started coming to England. And, Professor Brown says, their presence began to change attitudes about what theater could be, what plays should be about, and—maybe most importantly—about what kinds of people could play female roles. Pamela Allen Brown is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Pamela Allen Brown is a Professor of English at the Universit

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 Night." A theater troupe flirts its way through rehearsals of "As You Like It" in an Argentine forest. If you’re noticing a pattern here, you’re not mistaken. These scenes all come from the films of Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro. Born in Buenos Aires and now living in New York, Piñeiro has developed a cycle of six beautifully-filmed movies he calls “The Shakespeare Reads,” all of which are based around the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies. Piñeiro talks with Barbara Bogaev about his unique approach to his work and his craft. Matías Piñeiro is a screenwriter, director, and filmmaker. The six films in his “The Shakespeare Reads” series are "Rosalinda," "Viola," "The Princess of France," "Hermia & Helena," "Isabella," and the short film "Sycorax." Stream all of these films on MUBI, or buy them on Blu-ray

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 everything in between. At some point, every one of those editions passed under the eyes of an editor who decided which version of which disputed word would be included, how characters’ names would be spelled, whether a quarto’s version was the best to use here or maybe the version in the First Folio, and so on. While the names of the many of Shakespeare’s male editors are well-known, up until now there has been little to nothing written about another group of Shakespeare editors: Women, who—since the early 19th century—have labored editing Shakespeare in the shadows of men, sometimes getting no credit at all, and sometimes—as you’ll hear—only getting blame. While Molly Yarn was writing her doctoral thesis on women editing Shakespeare, she discovered almost seventy female editors of Shakespeare. Now, she’s written

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 Changed Everything." In the book, Marche catalogs Shakespeare’s influence on (among other things) sex, language, psychology, and starlings. He talks with Barbara Bogaev about those legacies and more. Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. His book "How Shakespeare Changed Everything" was originally published by Harper Collins in 2011. His newest book, "The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future," has just been published by Simon & Schuster. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 15, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Influence Is Thine,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of