Shakespeare and Pals: Recapping the Bard

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.
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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”.
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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

011 The First Masterpiece: Richard III

Finally! We’re getting to the masterpieces. If Shakespeare had died before this one, do you think this podcast would exist? No! You wouldn’t even have heard of Shakespeare.
 
For hundreds of years after release, critics of this play thought it was just too bloody and depraved. Does it still have its power to shock? Join us for a bloody tale of fratricide, seduction, propaganda and some of the best speeches in Shakespeare.
 
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
 
Sources
The Oxford Shakespeare: Richard III (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)

010 Joan of Arc’s in This One! Henry VI, Part 1

When you get to the end of the story, where do you go? The beginning!
At the end of Henry VI, Part 3, Henry was dead and Richard III was ascendant. Now Shakespeare gives us a Star Wars-style prequel. One question remains: Is this play as good as the Star Wars prequels?
Join us for a war story of derring-do, Joan of Arc, and French villains with all the menace of Team Rocket.
Make sure to subscribe and share this podcast! Comments and questions can be sent to: shakespeare.pals@gmail.com
SourcesThe Oxford Shakespeare: King Henry VI, Part 1 (Oxford University Press)Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)Bevington, D. M. (1966). The Domineering Female in 1 Henry VI. Shakespeare Studies, 2, 51–58.Gutierrez, N. A. (1990). Gender and Value in “1 Henry VI”: The Role of Joan de Pucelle. Theatre Journal, 42(2), 183–193.Tricomi, A. H. (2001). Joan la Pucelle and the Inverted Saints Play in “1 Henry VI.” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 25(2), 5–31.

009 Roman Psycho: The Rape of Lucrece

If the title isn’t content warning enough… CW: sexual assault and suicide
Another narrative poem from the master playwright. A tale of the sex scandal that undid the Roman monarchy. And also a ten-page description of a painting…
 
Yes, the poem is salacious, but Shakespeare isn’t just slapping together a potboiler. Expanding a three page story from Livy’s History of Rome to one-hundred pages, Shakespeare gives us his famous psychological monologues. Here we have early glimpses of the pen that would bring us Brutus and Hamlet’s soul searching.
 
Sources
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems
The History of Rome, by Titius Livius
Fasti, by Ovid

008 Richard III, the early years: Henry VI, Part 3

The War of the Roses! A pacifist King, a warrior Queen, rebellious lords, and more battles than you can shake a wooden sword at. And like Revenge of the Sith, we see the rise of one of fiction’s most famous baddies – Richard III!
 
Is this much-ignored war-story worth picking up? Michael, Greg, and Sophie find out.
 
Sources:
The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare, by Anna Beer, from Wiley Blackwell
William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, by S. Schoenbaum, from Oxford University Press
The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, by Peter Levi, from PaperMac
Shakespeare: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, from Vintage

007 Shakespeare’s Rival: Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part 1

The Avengers Endgame of its day! The bombastic bio-play of the Middle Eastern conqueror Timur. Written by Christopher Marlowe, smoker, spy, and Shakespeare’s best frenemy. After 400 years does this uber-popular, uber-influential hit of the Elizabethan stage still hold up? Michael, Greg and Sophie dig in.
 
Sources:
Christopher Marlowe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miller MacLure, from Routledge
“Christopher Marlowe” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Charles Nicholl, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-18079
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney, from Cambridge University Press:
“Marlowe and the English Literary Scene” by James P Bednarz

006 That Play You’ve Sort Of Heard Of: Henry VI, Part 2

Why are we doing Part 2 before Part 1? Because like George Lucas, Shakespeare got to Part 1 later.
 
Shakespeare's first and massively successful history play shows us the too, too pious King Henry VI surrounded by Machiavellian politicians, an adulterous wife, a working class rebellion, and the traitorous Duke of York.
 
Sources
The Oxford Shakespeare: King Henry VI, Part 2 (Oxford University Press)
The Life of the Author, William Shakespeare by Anna Beer (John Wiley & Sons)
William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life by Samuel Schoenbaum (Oxford University Press)
Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge)
 
Comments and questions can be sent to shakespeare.pals@gmail.com