Shakespeare and Pals: Recapping the Bard

021 Disaster Gays: Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1593)

Gayer than Shakespeare – Got your attention?
Finding queer subtext in renaissance plays usually takes digging. Not here though. Marlowe has his King and boytoy howling sweet nothings to each other. And this is the Christian 1590s – surely these two disaster gays have a happy ending?
Gay love, political intrigue, rebellion, far too many characters – can old Kit Marlowe match the quality and convolutedness of Shakespeare’s history plays? Join Michael and Sophie to find out!
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (Penguin Classics)
Christopher Marlowe, Edward II (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0007%3Aact%3D1%3Ascene%3D1)

020 The Prequels Were Better: Richard II (1595)

The Prequel Tetralogy begins!
Before the Richard III, before Henry VI, before the War of the Roses, there was unmanly, luxurious Richard II. Under his all-powerful negligence, a squabble between nobles becomes a cause for rebellion against the crown, with Henry Bolingbroke becoming Henry IV!
... spoilers...
Sandwiched between Richard III and the Henry plays, has this history play been unfairly overshadowed?
Join us to find out!
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Richard II (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)

019 Five Tudor Sonnets and Us Being Idiots

Turns out we’re publishing this one…
 
We’re going on an unstructured ramble about the most structured poetic form. This month, we’re looking at five Tudor sonnets – and only two of them are Shakespeare!
 
A sonnet might just be fourteen, but they pack a lot of food for thought into each one. Join us as we discuss: 
Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where Is an Hind
Philip Sidney’s “Stella, Since Thou So Right A Princess Art”
Richard Barnfield’s “Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape”
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 10 and 55
 
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
 
Sources:
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Encyclopedia Britannica

018 Onii-san~!!: John Ford’s ”’Tis Pity She’s a W****” (1629)

We really have been trying to make this podcast more family friendly...
Here we have an edgy take on Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet’s problem was there families were too far apart. Giovanni and Annabella’s families are too close. They’re the same family. They’re brother and sister.
But that’s not all, we’ve also got street fights, dumb nephews, evil Spaniards, and scene-stealing banditti.
Is this Renaissance tragedy more than an exercise in edginess? Join us as we discuss “‘Tis Pity She’s a Sex-Positive Lady”!
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
John Ford, ed. Sonia Massai, Arden Early Modern Drama: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Bloomsbury Publishing
John Ford, entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ford-British-dramatist

017 Boy Meets Girl, Boy and Girl Die: Romeo and Juliet

Here’s a hot-take: Romeo and Juliet is a love story.
Shakespeare’s tragic love story is so iconic I don’t even need to say anything about it. You’ve Romeo and Juliet with New York gangs and garden gnomes. But join us to see all the details and subtext the updates miss.
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)

016 Carry On College Princes: Love’s Labour’s Lost

You have no idea what this one’s about, do you? Great title though.
Would you believe this romantic comedy about four nobles trying to become celibate scholars actually holds up quite well? Would you believe it has some of Shakespeare’s feistiest heroines? Would you believe it has one of his most realistic depictions of causal romance? 
Well, you’re just going have to listen to find out.
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)
Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (Vintage)
Johnathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton)
Anna Beer, The Life of the Author, William Shakespeare (Wiley Blackwell)
Peter Levi, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (Henry Holt & Co)
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford University Press)

015 Shakespeare’s Edgelord Phase: Titus Andronicus

This one gets all the trigger warnings: rape, murder, racism, amputation, cannibalism, questionable anachronisms, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten. Does this draw you in? It certainly scared off centuries of Shakespeare admirers. Some early critics even refused to believe Shakespeare penned this blood bath.
Is Titus Andronicus a good riff on the Roman tragedy? Or is it all just a bit much? Michael and Sophie dig in.
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
The Oxford Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)
Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (Vintage)
Johnathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton)
Anna Beer, The Life of the Author, William Shakespeare (Wiley Blackwell)
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford University Press)

014 Atrocities Roman Style: Seneca’s “Medea” and “Thyestes”

We’re forced to read “Hamlet” at school. Shakespeare was forced to read “Thyestes”. 
Family squabbles turning hyperviolent has a long history, nowhere more violent than in these Ancient Roman classics. Do Seneca’s bloody plays still have power to shock? We dig into “Medea” and “Thyestes”.
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
Sources:
Seneca, Six Tragedies, trans. Emily Wilson (Oxford University Press)
Seneca, Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E F Watling (Penguin Books)

013 Poor Artists Imitate, Great Artists Steal: The Comedy of Errors

How does a 400-year-old play feel more old-fashioned than a 2000-year-old one? Shakespeare brings family values, civic virtue, and basic human decency to Plautus’ farce of selfishness and hedonism.
 
Like West Side Story to Roman and Juliet, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is to Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus. The mistaken identities and whirling confusion is the same but the values are not.
 
Join us to discuss adaptations, sanitation, grafting a third dimension onto cardboard cut-outs, and the movie Airplane!
 
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
 
Sources
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)

012 2000-Years-Old But Feeling 60: Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus

You know how you were forced to read Shakespeare in school? Shakespeare was forced to read Plautus. Any Renaissance writer worth his salt riffed on this Roman Republican comedian. Shakespeare liked this play so much he based The Comedy of Errors on it.
 
It’s a classic tale of long-separated twins getting mistaken for each other.
 
Has this 2000-year-old comedy aged well? Get ready for mistaken identity, hedonism, the art of translation, 1960s-style sexism, ancient-style slavery and – above all – brotherly love.
 
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
 
Sources
Plautus, Four Comedies, trans. Erich Segal (the guy who wrote Love Story – you know, the movie your grandfather sort of remembers – ‘love means never having to say your sorry’, that one.), Oxford University Press
Plautus, Menaechmi, or The Twin Brothers, edited by Henry Thomas Riley, Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=pl.+men.+1
The Encyclopedia Britannica, Plautus (Roman dramatist), https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plautus