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Shakespeare & Beyond

Top 10 Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes of 2019

Our top Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes from 2019 feature interviews with authors, directors, actors, and scholars. Happy listening!

1. Deborah Harkness: A Discovery of Witches

In 1994, Deborah Harkness was doing research at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library when she stumbled across the Book of Soyga, a long-lost manuscript treatise on magic that once belonged to Elizabethan scientist and occult philosopher John Dee. Out of this encounter came her idea for a popular novel, A Discovery of Witches, which was made into a television series this year.

2. Acting, Emotion, and Science on Shakespeare’s Stage, with Joseph Roach

How do actors do what they do? How do they stir up emotions, both in themselves and in us as we watch them? Joseph Roach’s 1985 book The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting examined how the actor’s art has been understood by scientists, philosophers, actors, and audiences through history: from Shakespeare’s 17th century, when actors emitted animal spirits through their eyes, to David Garrick’s 18th century, when pneumatic tubes transmitted emotion from the brain to the body. We talk with Joseph Roach about historical theories of acting that affected how our favorite playwrights wrote and even made their way into the most influential acting techniques of the 20th century.