In her new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Dame Judi Dench and actor/director Brendan O’Hea chat about her long history with the Bard. On this episode, Dench and O’Hea join host Barbara Bogaev to talk about Dench’s experiences playing Ophelia, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth and Titania. Plus, parrots, Polonius, dirty words, hijinks with Sir Ian McKellen, why it’s easier to laugh while working on a tragedy, and more.

Dame Judi Dench has played nearly all of Shakespeare’s great roles for women, plus a few non-Shakespearean parts, too, including the title role in Stephen Frears’ Philomena, M in 8 of the James Bond films, Granny in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, and Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, for which she won an Academy Award. Brendan O’Hea has acted in and directed multiple productions at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and appeared with Dench in the film Quantum of Solace. Their book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent is available from St. Martin’s Press.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 9, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Kendra Hanna. 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 London Broadcast Studios and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Land enclosure. Wildlife management. Erosion. Pollution. Mining practices. Today, we’d call these environmental issues. But, hundreds of years before the modern environmental movement coalesced, these issues also appeared in Shakespeare’s plays. We talk to Todd Andrew Borlik, a professor at the University of Huddersfield and author of Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, about ecology and environmentalism in Shakespeare’s works.

Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain is out now from Oxford University Press.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 9, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Kendra Hanna. 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 Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents “Judith” Shakespeare, and concludes that this female genius would have been doomed.

But that’s not the end of the story. If Woolf had read Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer (nee Bassano), Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Cary, she might have thought differently about the fate of her fictional Judith Shakespeare. Ramie Targoff's new book, Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, explores the lives and works of those four women. Targoff tells us about them and reflects on why reading their work is so important.

Ramie Targoff teaches English and Italian literature at Brandeis University. She is a member of the Folger’s Board of Governors. Her book Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance is available from Knopf.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published March 12, 2024. © 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 Digital Island Studios in New York and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.