The Witch Of Edmonton

A riposte to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Fletcher’s play is a riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: in this lecture I discuss their interconnectedness as a way to identify Fletcher’s particular dramaturgy. 

Reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays This lecture discusses the play’s reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays, its sensationalism, and its connections to anatomy. 

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic u ...  Show more

Lecture eight in the Approaching Shakespeare series asks the question that structures Richard II: does the play suggest Henry Bolingbroke's overthrow of the king was justified? 

Simon Armitage delivers his final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, reflecting on his own influences as a poet. 

In this fourth Approaching Shakespeare lecture the question is one of agency: who or what makes happen the things that happen in Macbeth?