Happy April!
We're trying something a little different this month and including more information about our episodes that came out this month.
It's also birthday season at Shakespeare Anyone? as both of our birthdays and Shakespeare's are within two weeks of each other. So, we are celebrating by giving our listeners and followers 10% off of everything in our merch store (it's also the 1-year anniversary of launching our merch store). The discount automatically applies at checkout.
This month's episodes
In anticipation of Earth Day and Shakespeare's birthday, we are joined by Katherine (Katie) Steele Brokaw to discuss how Shakespeare can be used as a tool to create conversations around ecological issues that impact our communities. We discuss how Shakespeare is already well-positioned to be used as an eco-playwright, why it is important to utilize his plays to speak to our current moment, and how theatremakers and educators can incorporate ecological practices into their productions and readings of Shakespeare's plays.
About Katherine Steele Brokaw
Katherine Steele Brokaw is a Professor of English at University of Texas at Austin and the Director of Shakespeare at Winedale at UT. Her work focuses primarily on the production and study of Shakespearean performance, with a special interest in how modern productions can be used to highlight ecological issues. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama and Shakespeare and Community Performance and she is co-author, with Elizabeth Freestone, of Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet. She was the co-founding artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite, where she adapted and directed eight productions.
In this episode, we use Freyja Cox Jensen's Reading the Roman Republic in Early Modern England to explore how early modern readers encountered, studied, and understood ancient Rome, and what that means for how we read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
First, we ask whether early modern people were truly obsessed with Julius Caesar and ancient Rome, and how Rome became so omnipresent in the early modern imagination. We then trace the roots of that obsession: how Roman history was embedded in early modern education and pedagogical theory, which Roman authors Shakespeare and his contemporaries were actually reading, and how the rise of the printing industry accelerated the spread of classical texts across England.
From there, we explore what early modern people actually thought about Rome: how they understood it, idealized it, and argued about it. Last but not least, we'll examine how ancient Rome was reimagined on the early modern stage, and what all of this tells us about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
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Over on Patreon...
Over on our Patreon, this month, Patreon patrons at select tiers received our annual birthday postcard.
