A Teenager's Take on Shakespeare

Annabelle Higgins
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A Teenager's Take on Shakespeare offers you a plethora of perspectives, opinions and insights from many different parts of the Shakespeare world, all through informal interviews hosted and conducted by teen host Annabelle Higgins. Every episode will be summed up by a short Teenager's Take recapping its key ideas and offering listeners further food for thought. This podcast is all about making Shakespeare more accessible, opening up the world of early modern drama to anyone and everyone interested in delving into this amazing field. Happy listening!

  1. 11/28/2025

    The Deep Dive: Shakespeare, The First Folio, and Portable Magic with Emma Smith

    Welcome, listeners, to the final episode of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare — consider this a little early Christmas present for you all!  This episode's guest was a huge inspiration to me when I first delved deep into Shakespeare and is now, I am very fortunate to say, one of my professors at the University of Oxford. Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College Oxford. She has published widely on Shakespeare including her book This Is Shakespeare. She is a Board member at the Royal Shakespeare Company and works as a dramaturg and advisor to numerous Shakespeare projects and productions.  Make sure you listen to the end to hear an exciting update on the future of this podcast! Check out Emma’s monthly Oxford World Classics webinars here; and, of course, you can find A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare at @ateenagerstakeonshakespeare on Instagram.  Enjoy!

    58 min

  2. 11/13/2025

    Beyond the Folio: Pop Shakespeare with Ian Doescher

    Welcome to another special episode of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare!  In this episode, I, host Annabelle Higgins, discuss several well-known Shakespearean classics such as Verily, A New Hope, Much Ado About Mean Girls, The Taming of the Clueless, and — hang on, are those Shakespeare? Nope, they’re the work of today’s amazing guest, Ian Doescher. Ian Doescher lives in Portland, Oregon, and is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen books published by Quirk Books, including the William Shakespeare's Star Wars series, and six self-published books. In 2020, Ian created the Shakespeare 2020 Project.  You can find Ian on Instagram at @ian.doescher and on his website, iandoescher.com — and you can find A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare at @ateenagerstakeonshakespeare on Instagram.  Enjoy!

    45 min

  3. 05/13/2025

    Shakespeare in Oxford: The JCSP with Dr Peter Sutton

    Hello listeners, and welcome back to A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare! In this episode, I open up my discussion of Shakespeare in Oxford with Dr Peter Sutton, covering Jesus College’s impressive Shakespeare Project, and learn a thing or two about directing student productions! Dr Peter Sutton is Alumni Engagement Manager of Jesus College, Oxford and Artistic Director of the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. He read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford before moving to the University of St Andrews where he completed a Master's in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Culture and a doctorate on political and social appropriations of Ben Jonson in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. In 2021, Peter began directing the Jesus College Shakespeare Project - an ambitious collaboration between the college's Access and Development teams - to stage the Complete Works of Shakespeare for audiences of schoolchildren as well as the college alumni and wider university community. So far he has directed The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, the three parts of Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, King John, Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, and is currently starting rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Project is due to complete in 2034. Outside of the Project, he has also directed productions of Gilbert and Sullivan and Ben Jonson, as well as the premiere of Brean Hammond's Ben and Jamie and a hybrid production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. As an actor, he has worked on plays by Shakespeare, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few, and has also appeared in a number of music theatre works including playing a principal baritone in all thirteen extant Gilbert and Sullivan operas, along with appearances in operas by Gluck, Janacek and Handel. Enjoy!

    1h 3m

  4. 12/29/2024

    The Deep Dive: Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers with Dr Darren Freebury-Jones

    Hello, listeners, and welcome to Season 5, Episode 3 of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare! In this episode, I talk with Dr Darren Freebury-Jones about his monograph ’Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers’, spanning Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, John Fletcher, and, of course, the great Bard himself. Dr Darren Freebury-Jones is author of the monographs: Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival (Routledge), Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd (Manchester University Press), and Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers (Manchester University Press). He is Associate Editor for the first critical edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd since 1901 (Boydell and Brewer). He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston’s dramatic corpus as part of the Oxford Marston project and is General Editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene (Edinburgh University Press). His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed in national newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Observer, and The Independent as well as BBC Radio. In 2023 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship. You can find Darren through his website darrenfj.wordpress.com, where you can find a list of his publications and other endeavours. Enjoy!

    59 min

  5. 09/23/2024

    The Deep Dive: Unearthing Shakespeare with Valerie Clayman Pye

    Welcome, listeners, to episode 2 of Season 5 of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare! In this episode, I talk with Valerie Clayman Pye about her amazing books, audience engagement and subjectivity, embodied performance, and much, much more.  Valerie Clayman Pye is an actor, director, author, and academic who specializes in making Shakespeare accessible and training other artists to do the same. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management at LIU Post, where she teaches acting, voice and speech, and Shakespeare in Performance and is Associate Faculty with Theatrical Intimacy Education, a consulting group that specializes in researching, developing, and teaching best practices for staging theatrical intimacy.  A professional actor and director, Valerie’s work has reached audiences in over twenty countries. Her book, Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Performance and the Globe (Routledge) is the first book to consider how the unique properties of Shakespeare’s theatre can help train actors as well as enliven performances of Shakespeare’s plays. She is the co-editor of Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor (with Hillary Haft Bucs), and Shakespeare and Tourism (with Robert Ormsby).  Her essays have appeared in Shakespeare, Teaching Shakespeare, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and several essay collections. When she isn’t focusing on Shakespeare and devising new work of her own, Valerie has worked extensively on new play development, alongside writers such as Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men). A 2018-20 LabWorks Artist at the New Victory Theatre in NYC, Valerie was the lead creative artist on "Shakespeare’s Stars", an immersive, multi-media, multi-sensory performance for babies and their caregivers (Spellbound Theatre), which was featured in The Wall Street Journal and had its Off-Broadway debut at the New Victory Theatre in May 2023. Her most recent book, with Robert Myles, is Innovation & Digital Theatremaking: Rethinking Theatre with ‘The Show Must Go Online’ (Routledge). You can find Valerie on Twitter at @valerie_pye and on her website ⁠www.valerieclaymanpye.com⁠. Do check out her books ‘Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Shakespeare at the Globe’ and 'Innovation & Digital Theatremaking: Rethinking Theatre with "The Show Must Go Online”’ (a collaboration with Robert Myles)! Enjoy!

    1h 4m

  6. 06/23/2024

    The Deep Dive: Shakespeare’s White Others with Dr David Sterling Brown

    Welcome, listeners, to the first episode of Season 5, in which we’ll be taking a deep dive into Shakespeare’s texts with various scintillating minds! In this episode, I talk with David Sterling Brown about his book, Shakespeare’s White Others; we explore who the white other is, crossing the intraracial colour line, the decomposition of white masculinity, and much, much more. Dr. David Sterling Brown, Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, is author of Shakespeare’s White Others and the forthcoming Hood Pedagogy: Teaching Shakespeare from Within —both with Cambridge University Press. Brown has published numerous peer-reviewed and public-facing articles, most recently an article in The Conversation, and he has delivered myriad invited talks since joining the profession in 2015. In 2023, he launched his “Visualizing Race Virtually” art exhibition that showcases 39 Folger Library digital images. You can access his virtual-reality art gallery and explore his contributions to the humanities at www.DavidSterlingBrown.com. In addition to being a member of the Race Before Race Executive Board, he sits on the editorial boards for Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey and he is an American Shakespeare Center Board of Trustees member. Brown is also a Curatorial Team member for The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine. You can find David on Twitter at @_theBrownprint_ and on Instagram at @BrownprintLLC. Enjoy!

    59 min

  7. 03/31/2024

    Teen Take Shax Miscellany: Monologue Roundup

    Welcome to A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare’s fourth Monologue Roundup, wrapping up the Teen Take Shax Miscellany. This has been such a fun season to record and share with you all — with no one set theme uniting the episodes, we’ve covered a lot of different ground with these plays, from the spooky to the festive and everything in between. Here David Johnson and Melissa Barrett, Ellicia Elliott, Drs Danielle Rosvally and Trevor Boffone, Stephanie Crugnola, Blioux Kirkby and Nat Kennedy have chosen various extracts from Shakespeare that reflect the amazing discussions we had. Thank you so much to all of you for your contributions! To all of these, I will as usual add my own little something as a relish to conclude our audio performance. This season has definitely been longer than any other, but I’ve come to realise that as a creator and a teenager with a great deal of life experience to gain at the moment, I can't confine myself to meticulous deadlines the way I might like to. As such, I want to thank you all for your patience, and I hope you’re ready for Season 5! In the meantime, do check out all of our social media handles! You can find Sun and Moon Theatre on Twitter at @sunmoontheatre, on Facebook at @sunandmoontheatre and on Instagram at @sunandmoontheatr (their website is sunandmoontheatreuk.com); Ellicia on Twitter at @ElliciaElliott, on Instagram at @ellicia_elliott and on her website elliciaelliott.com; Yassified Shakespeare on Instagram and TikTok at @yassifiedshax and on yassifiedshakespeare.com; Steph’s podcast Protest Too Much on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok at @p2mpod, and The Sirrah Sisters at @thesirrahsisters on Instagram, @SirrahSisters on Twitter, The Sirrah Sisters on FaceBook and @thesirrahsisters3888 on YouTube. You can find the podcast on Instagram at @ateenagerstakeonshakespeare and on Twitter at @TeenTakeShax, and my guests’ handles will be in the descriptions of their respective episodes. Enjoy!

    27 min

  8. 03/10/2024

    Teen Take Shax Miscellany: Shakespeare Theatre Lab with Olga Blagodatskikh

    Welcome, everyone, to Season 4, Episode 6 of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare! In this episode, I chat with Olga Blagodatskih about her work in the Moscow Shake-scene, the way she approaches Shakespeare’s texts and how small roles can have a big impact. Olga Blagodatskikh is a bilingual actor, voice-over artist, and educator. Passion for classical English theatre brought her to London to study Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where she played the French King in King John, Jacques in As You Like It and Lady Macbeth, and received the RADA Shakespeare Platinum Awards. Olga is founder and host of the international Shakespeare Play Reading Club, and co-founder of Shakespeare Theatre Lab Moscow. Her Shakespearean credits include Richard II and Romeo and Juliet with 60 Hour Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well with The Show Must Go Online and a great number of online productions played from cues only with Shake-scene Shakespeare company. Also, Olga has recently made her directorial debut on the Moscow stage with The Merchant of Venice. You can find Olga on Instagram at @olga_blagod and on Facebook (just search Olga Blagodatskikh). You can also find Shakespeare Play Reading Club and Shakespeare Theatre Lab on Facebook. Enjoy!

    56 min
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About

A Teenager's Take on Shakespeare offers you a plethora of perspectives, opinions and insights from many different parts of the Shakespeare world, all through informal interviews hosted and conducted by teen host Annabelle Higgins. Every episode will be summed up by a short Teenager's Take recapping its key ideas and offering listeners further food for thought. This podcast is all about making Shakespeare more accessible, opening up the world of early modern drama to anyone and everyone interested in delving into this amazing field. Happy listening!

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