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In an unprecedented second episode on a play, Sheldrake examines the linguistic DNA of Hamlet and finds three rhetorical techniques that per...
In an episode dedicated to a great Shakespearean, Mr John Branston, Sheldrake drifts slightly from the one-play-one-idea tagline to focus on...
Few people in the world will have spent as many hours working on the delivery and performance of Shakespeare as Robert Price. After a career...
In the first of two episodes on this mightiest of plays, Sheldrake compares the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with its sources, uncovering a...
In his return to the airwaves, Sheldrake considers the extraordinary popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and concludes that it is the da...
Henry V: one of the most patriotic characters and plays in all of literature, surely? Not so, says Sheldrake. Henry V and his world are thor...
How did people learn to act in the Renaissance? Did the texts themselves co-operate in teaching newish actors how to do certain things? Shel...
What to say about Henry IV Part 1? In the first of three main episodes, each of which will tackle one play in this Henriad, Sheldrake explor...
He claims no monopoly on wisdom in this area, but as an academic year draws to a close and the long vacation heaves into view, Sheldrake ref...
We associate Shakespeare with humanity, warmth, generosity and kindness when he writes about people who have made a wrong decision. Even Ric...
Thanks to a couple of nearby anniversaries, we are hearing more than ever not only what great theatre Shakespeare is, but also what a positi...
The Tempest is a difficult play to nail down. It is also the most reinterpreted and adapted of Shakespeare’s plays. In this episode, Sheldra...
Ben Jonson. Rival or friend of Shakespeare? Grumpy old bore or stout moralist? In a typical cop-out, Sheldrake thinks both caricatures are t...
We seem to spend much of our lives asking whether things are worth it. Are they worth the money, the time, the effort? Are we getting value...
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be leading a seminar at RADA on Measure for Measure. In preparing for that seminar I found myself disa...
It’s difficult to know what, and particularly who, to talk about in Othello. Iago is a distraction, Othello likes to inflate his own sense o...
Falstaff will exceed the bounds of whatever box you try to put him in, a truth I found out for myself in the last Short Sheldrake on Shakesp...
Twelfth Night seems to be everyone’s favourite Shakespeare play. Why is this the case? Could it be something to do with the fact that it is...
Sir John Falstaff is a river who has burst his banks. He has taken on a life beyond Shakespeare’s plays and become a myth in his own right....
King Lear is a work of obvious genius, so what to say about it in fifteen minutes that can illuminate it? Using the historical idea of servi...
Globe Education is launching its new season, a rich array of theatrical and academic events culminating in a two-day conference next April....
We all have an image in our mind’s eye of Shakespearean performance during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but what happened between then and now? W...
This is not the first time genre has been used as a critical tool for understanding Shakespeare’s process and plays, but Sheldrake – never o...
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not a play many people have read. Though were they to read it, they might think they have, because it reads l...
Shakespeare nicked stuff from everywhere; prose narratives, history books, other plays. Sheldrake rattles through a few of the old chestnuts...
In a resumption of normal service that is perhaps not quite the triumphant return he would like, Sheldrake confesses himself drawn more to t...
A very great number of Shakespeare performances in Britain are conducted by amateur companies. People gathering together to do Shakespeare f...
Testing the patience of listeners once again by talking about someone who isn’t Shakespeare, Sheldrake investigates the peculiar career of J...
Sheldrake decides to put his money where his mouth is regarding Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Why should we care about Marlowe, both on his...
The soliloquy is one of Shakespeare’s most recognisable and distinctive theatrical devices. It is in no small part responsible for his...
How do we know when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays? Well, there are several methods of dating a play. Sheldrake rattles through them, t...
For many years, Globe Education has been staging performances with scripts of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in a series called R...
Attempts to reconstruct the original performance circumstances of Renaissance plays, either literally or imaginatively, have been a constant...
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are things you nearly always read alone. But there is a rich seam of drama and conversation to be mined from them, as...
Where did the magic happen? We’ve all heard of the Globe, but what did it mean for a play to be written for one playhouse rather than anothe...
As social politics continue to change with gathering speed, works of literature have to catch up or fall by the wayside. The plays of Shakes...
Turning introspective for a moment, Sheldrake considers what value Shakespeare criticism can be said to have. Subscribe on iTunes: http://ti...
Richard II has grown in fame in recent years, but is hounded by the fact that the central character is brilliant whilst the rest of the play...
The poetry of Shakespeare tends to be an “also-ran” in his canon, but Venus and Adonis tells us as much about his development and abilities...
Form is almost absent from the modern critical radar, which has put Love’s Labour’s Lost on the back burner. In a courageous rear-guard acti...
London was growing up fast in Shakespeare’s day. Whether you’re familiar with Shakespeare or not, Timon of Athens seems a very p...
The Merry Wives of Windsor is devoid of ideas, so let’s talk about language instead. And hear Sheldrake play five parts in fifteen minutes....
If you think Shakespeare was a purely natural genius, the words spilling out from a free spirit of a mind, think again. Shakespeare’s rigoro...
Henry VIII is a little known play, but it bears witness to John Fletcher’s apprenticeship to William Shakespeare. And perhaps it’s not that...
We are so used to some of Shakespeare’s plays that it can be very difficult to see their shape with clear eyes. Fusing historical context wi...
Without the First Folio, half of Shakespeare’s plays would be lost. What was the process that led to this miraculous book? And how was...
Romeo and Juliet. Either you love it or you hate it. But might there be a middle road between those viewpoints that reveals the clever struc...
In the first of a series of supplementary podcasts, Sheldrake talks about the boys who created Shakespeare’s female roles on-stage. Also ava...
  As You Like It is liked by audiences, disliked by academics. What then does this tell us about how crucial performance is to the succ...
Titus Andronicus is rarely read, seen, or heard, but it does not deserve this lack of reputation. Not only does it have much to recommend it...