Something Shakespeare This Way Comes Something Shakespeare This Way Comes

Lovers of Greek mythology (and Shakespeare), rise up! If you thought you might like Shakespeare better if he just talked about a mythological figure for once, you’re in luck.

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare covers some of the last days of the Trojan War, including some of the mythical heroes you all know and love, turns most of them into complete jerks, and then features a pair of young lovers who are torn about by circumstance and don’t end up dead.

This don’t end up dead thing has annoyed a lot of people for a number of years.

In this episode, I get into some of the weirdness that is this play, interpretations of the characters, and how Shakespeare is basically fitting into the mold of the modern boom of books centered around women in Greek mythology and how they all saw these stories playing out.

There’s a lot of good stuff going on, and I suggest you give it a try even though you’ve probably never heard of Troilus and Cressida and maybe don’t care. Don’t you care about the Trojan War? Who doesn’t!? (Don’t answer that.)

This play has the interesting potential to really blow up the scene as maybe the most modern feeling of all of Shakespeare’s plays that is directly engaging with a popular Greek myth. But it’s also really weird and sort of uncomfortable to get through, so it could remain obscure for everyone by the nerds.



Further Reading

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare (This Arden edition has a really great introduction that gives a ton of context and background.)

The “Troilus and Cressida” chapter from Shakespeare After
All by Marjorie Garber

“‘Rule in Unity’ and Otherwise: Love and Sex in ‘Troilus and Cressida’"by James O'Rourke (This has a ton of interesting stuff in it about Cressida)

“He Do Cressida in Different Voices” by Barbara Hodgdon

“Ulysses Is Not the Hero of ‘Troilus and Cressida’” by Tim Spiekerman (This author makes a detailed argument over why Ulysses is not such a great guy, going against the traditional reading of the play.)

“The Tragedy of Existence: Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida’"by Joyce Carol Oates (I don’t agree with all her points, but she makes an interesting case.)

Credit where credit is due

Podcast art by ⁠⁠Halie Branson⁠⁠

Music recording by ⁠⁠josdvg⁠

Ever have to do close reading for a literature class and did you find it kind of fun or incredibly painful? Maybe you just spun some masterful BS to hit the word count.

Today we’re going to be approaching Shakespeare much in the same way, thinking about why we do close reading and then giving it a try. It’s probably not surprising that as an English major, I usually ended up finding close reading to be a useful or interesting exercise and it’s not a muscle I often have to flex now that I’ve been out of a school for…awhile.

With the use of some randomizer tools to help me land on a play and an act, I landed on a passage spoken by Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, which is perfect for being a play I enjoy and also because she is a delightful character who you might want to hear more about! I try to dig all I can out of about 20 lines of dialogue to determine what it can tell us about Beatrice, the structure of the play, and some cool new things to say to people who ask you when you’re getting married.

If you’d like to follow along, you can find full text of the play the Folger Shakespeare Library website or come find me on Instagram @somethingshakespearepod.

Credit where credit is due

Podcast art by ⁠Halie Branson⁠

Music recording by ⁠josdvg⁠

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play? Do you consider
your favorite to be on brand for you? And does anyone else feel extreme pressure when asked what their favorite book is to give a perfect answer even though such a thing isn’t possible?

In this episode, we’ll be having a little fun, looking at a selection of Shakespeare plays and determining what kind of person you are if, say, Hamlet is your favorite. (Spoiler alert: you might be a depressed Millennial.)

My own guesses will be accompanied by responses from my family and friends on social as to why they picked certain plays as their favorite.

I’m hoping that this episode can also serve as a sort of exploration of some of the different kinds of stories Shakespeare tells and the characters that populate them so you that you can determine if maybe it’s time to revisit a play you didn’t get the last time you read or watched it or if maybe it’s time to give a play a chance at all.

There’s a little something for everyone here, but we’ll have
to come back for a part two to cover the rest of the spread.

Further Reading

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (I first read this book at the suggestion of a librarian, who completely nailed my interests. It's set right before Elizabeth becomes queen, so in the same general time period as Shakespeare!)

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin (The first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. These books are so good and have nothing to do with Shakespeare.)

Credit where credit is due

Podcast art by ⁠⁠Halie Branson⁠⁠

Music recording by ⁠⁠josdvg⁠

To give or not to give a one-star review? That can sometimes be the question when you are faced with reading and rating a classic that doesn’t live up to the glorious tales everyone has been telling about it.

And that’s especially true when it comes to one of Shakespeare’s most famous and highly renowned plays, Hamlet. Whether you love or hate Hamlet (or even just feel sort of meh about it), we can’t deny that it has a particularly large impact on popular culture, containing multiple turns of phrase that we still use regularly today.

I asked Ben to return and look up some bad reviews of Hamlet so that we could start talking about the aspects of the play people don’t like – and how it’s largely okay to not like a classic piece of literature.

Of course, he found some kind of ridiculous arguments, but overall the reviews serve as a nice reminder that Shakespeare can be difficult to understand, that certain characters in this place generate a lot of opinions, and even that the practice of publishing and copyright used to be different!

Also, a surprise appearance from T.S. Eliot.

Further Listening

One-Star Shakespeare (the original episode)

Shakespeare in Love with Guest Ben Roman (if you like listening to Ben)

Further Reading

“Hamlet” an essay by T.S. Eliot



Credit where credit is due

Podcast art by ⁠Halie Branson⁠

Music recording by ⁠josdvg⁠

Do the sonnets really prove that Shakespeare was gay? Listen, when has anything ever proven anything about Shakespeare?

More than any other piece of writing he left behind, Shakespeare's sonnets invite a lot of speculation and excitement about his biography. Throughout time people have thought that they would be able to figure out who this young man is and the identity of the woman that he must have had an affair with.

But there's just as much peril trying to read autobiography into the sonnets as there is in trying to read autobiography into his plays. The sonnets are an art form and a literary experiment all on their own. It is exciting that we don't know when they were written, whether they were published behind Shakespeare's back, or even who they are dedicated to, but for all the excitement these things generate about the details of Shakespeare's life, we have to remember that the sonnets are also a highly stylized aesthetic tool.

Join me as I explore the details that scholars have pored and argued over and how these things have helped create some interest and excitement over a body of work that often gets passed over in favor of a bunch of (admittedly very good) plays.



Sonnet collection referenced

The Sonnets and Narrative Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Burto and Sylvan Barnet

The Sonnets and Other Poems by William Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

Shakespeare's Sonnets: Revised (The Arden Shakespeare) ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler



Credit where credit is due

Podcast art by ⁠Halie Branson⁠

Music recording by ⁠josdvg⁠

The Ides of March have come and gone but I’m not quite done talking about Julius Caesar (the guy) or Julius Caesar (the play).

This play is harder to get into than some of Shakespeare’s other delightful works. To help explain why and to try to figure out where Shakespeare was coming from, I’ve read some Plutarch, gotten more context for how a sixteenth century audience might have thought about Roman history and looked at a lot of memes online.

When everyone’s favorite comparison about a distinguished figure in history is to talk about how he’s the same thing as a salad, what does that mean for how we relate to a play written about him?

Plus, some bonus thoughts on ways to set up a modern adaptation of the play.



Further Reading

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (see The Life of Brutus and The Life of Julius Caesar)

Gary Miles, “How Roman are Shakespeare’s ‘Romans’?”

Heather James, “Shakespeare’s Classical Plays” from the New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare

Marjorie Garber, “Julius Caesar” from Shakespeare After All



Credit where credit is due

Art by Halie Branson

Music recording by josdvg