Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life.

Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than presenting clear answers, Shakespeare lets these ideas collide on stage.

In this episode, Womersley explains how Shakespeare’s plays become what he calls “crucibles” for thinking. As characters struggle with competing values and impossible choices, audiences go on that journey with them—testing ideas, reconsidering assumptions, and confronting the same enduring dilemmas that have shaped human thought for centuries.

When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new cultural experience with an ambitious project in Pall Mall: a gallery devoted entirely to scenes from Shakespeare.

Boydell commissioned leading British artists to paint pivotal moments from the plays, then sold engraved reproductions for museum-goers to take home with them. The gallery quickly became a sensation and was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince of Wales. It also played a powerful role in transforming William Shakespeare from a popular playwright into a national icon.

The venture ultimately failed due to the economic turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and the many life-size paintings were cut into smaller canvases and all sold at auction. Yet its influence endured, shaping exhibition culture, influencing a British school of art, and inspiring the visual mythology of The

Joining us to explore the rise and fall of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery are Rosie Dias, Professor of Art History at the University of Warwick, and Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 23, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Mike Rucinski of Boutique Recording in Great Malvern, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White’s work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at major institutions including The Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and, most recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her projects include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, The Last Five Years, Macbeth in Stride, and By The Queen, which was featured in the Folger’s 2025 Reading Room Festival.

In this episode, White discusses All Is But Fantasy, her four-play musical cycle created for the RSC, where it’s now receiving its world premiere. The high-energy, gig-theater show investigates Shakespeare’s women and ambition, focusing on Lady Macbeth, Emilia, Juliet, and Richard III. Each piece combines performance with original music, using sound and rhythm as a way into the text and as a tool for rethinking these characters whose inner lives are often cut short or overlooked.

White reflects on why Shakespeare’s women so often meet tragic ends, how those stories continue to feel familiar, and what it means to keep staging them now. She considers the ways that music, performance, and adaptation can help us better understand Shakespeare today.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 10, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with Garland Scott serving as executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Melvin Rickarby in Stratford, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Paola García Acuña. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Whitney White is an Obie and Lily Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated director, actor, and musician, celebrated for her bold, innovative storytelling across both Broadway and off-Broadway. She recently received the Drama League’s 2025 Founders Award for Excellence in Directing and an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Directing.

All Is But Fantasy, White’s four-part musical exploration of Shakespeare’s women and ambition, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, marks her RSC debut as a writer, director, and actor. The two-part high-energy gig theater show is receiving its world premiere at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in January and February 2026.

White’s other directing credits on Broadway include The Last Five Years and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, off-Broadway credits include Liberation, Walden, Jordan’s, Soft, On Sugarland, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Our Dear Drug Lord, and For All the Women Who Thought They Were Mad. She recently opened Saturday Church, a new musical featuring songs by Sia and Honey Dijon at New York Theatre Workshop. She also created Macbeth In Stride at Brooklyn Academy of Music, writing the book, music and lyrics. Additional directing work includes The Secret Life of Bees, By The Queen, The Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, A Human Being of a Sort, An Iliad, The Amen Corner, Othello, Canyon, and Jump.

On screen, White has appeared in Ocean’s Eight, Single Drunk Female, Louie, and The Playboy Club, and she contributed as a writer to Boots Riley’s acclaimed series I’m A Virgo for Prime Video.

Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times, mathematician Rob Eastaway explores how mathematical thinking shaped Shakespeare’s language and imagination.

Shakespeare lived at a moment of major intellectual change, when England was newly encountering Indo-Arabic numerals, experimenting with new systems of calculation, and redefining ideas of measure and proportion. Eastaway shows how Shakespeare delighted in numbers and patterns, playing with “scores,” fractions, and symmetry in works like Othello, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale. Even familiar references to “nothing,” time, and music take on new meaning when viewed through a mathematical lens.

In this episode, Eastaway reveals how math was woven into everyday life in Shakespeare’s time and how reading with our “math glasses” on can offer fresh insights into Shakespeare’s language.

While Shakespeare was reshaping English drama, a parallel theatrical revolution was unfolding in Spain. During the Spanish Golden Age, playwright Lope de Vega pioneered the comedia nueva, a bold new dramatic form that broke classical rules in favor of fast-paced plots, emotional intensity, and popular appeal.

In this episode, scholar and translator Barbara Fuchs shares how the theatrical innovations of Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, and others, including a three-act structure, blended genres, and complex female roles, helped redefine early modern theater and influenced the kinds of stories told on the English stage. Fuchs traces the rich cultural exchange between Spain and England and the work that she is doing now with Diversifying the Classics to bring plays in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic to new audiences.

Fuchs also discusses her adaptation for young audiences of de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, a powerful story of collective resistance, whichwill be featured at the Folger’s Reading Room Festival on Saturday, January 24.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 12, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Barbara Fuchs, trained as a comparatist (English, Spanish, French, Italian), Professor Fuchs works on European cultural production from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, with a special emphasis on literature and empire, and on theater and performance in transnational contexts. As part of her commitment to the public humanities and collaborative work, she directs the UCLA “Diversifying the Classics” initiative and edits the series “The Comedia in Translation and Performance” for Juan de la Cuesta. She is also director of LA Escena, Los Angeles’ biennial festival of Hispanic classical theater, founded in 2018. Currently, Professor Fuchs serves as one of the articles editors for Renaissance Quarterly.

Professor Fuchs’ recent books include Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn 2021); The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs (Juan de la Cuesta 2021), a collaborative translation of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer; and The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe (Toronto 2020), co-edited with Mercedes García-Arenal. She is also one of the editors for the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012, 2018). Her Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a time of Pandemic, one of the first studies of how theater was transformed by COVID-19, was published by Methuen in September 2021. She is currently working on a translation and critical edition of Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Las guerras civiles de Granada with Payton Phillips Quintanilla.

In 2021, Professor Fuchs served as President of the Modern Language Association. She was recently awarded the inaugural “Premio Ñ” from the Instituto Cervantes, for the promotion of Spanish language and culture.