As long as producers insist on pretending Lear is the main character, they will be performing the wrong play. It's Kent, along with Edgar and Edmund, who deserve our attention. In Episode 28, Joel gives his unique perspective to one of Shakespeare's best plays.
Read MoreInterpreters of All's Well That End Well often play it as a romantic comedy, but this is an impossible task. The main character blackmails a man into marrying her, pursues him across Europe, commits sexual assault on him, fakes her death, humiliates him, and then blackmails him again into accepting her. In Episode 27, Joel looks at this complicated and often charmless play.
Read MoreRobust and endlessly versatile, Othello has rightly remained one of Shakespeare's most popular tragedies. We spend the entire play knowing more than the Moor of Venice and are forced to watch him slowly come undone. Watching Othello is like watching a car wreck: we see it coming and can do nothing but sit and wait for the crash to occur. In this episode of Shakespeare Unbard, Joel discusses one of Shakespeare's strongest plays.
Read MoreShakespeare entered his dark period with this unique and often troubling play, one which just barely earns its reputation as a comedy.
Read MoreIt's hard not to applaud Shakespeare for the audacity of Troilus and Cressida, whose cynical and unhappy story seems to mark Shakespeare's turn towards the darker themes that would mark the rest of his career.
Read MoreOne of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, Twelfth Night - otherwise known as What You Will - is Shakespeare's last genuine romantic comedy, but it still has its serious themes.
Read MoreAll is not rotten in the state of Denmark until Hamlet comes along and makes a mess of the whole thing. In Episode 22 of Shakespeare Unbard, Joel discusses Shakespeare's most famous play.
Read MoreWomen are wooed in Shakespeare, but until As you Like It, he never showed us the process by which they are won.
Read MoreThe central relationship of Julius Caesar is a masculine one: it is the dissolution of the friendship between Brutus and Cassius which is Shakespeare's primary concern. In focusing on something so personal, Shakespeare is able to demonstrate the manner in which large events have a personal cost. In Episode 20 of Shakespeare Unbard, Joel Fishbane explores one of Shakespeare's greatest and most enduring works.
Read MoreThe critic Norman Rabkin called Henry V “the capstone to an edifice of plays tightly mortared to one another”[i], and yet, the majority of productions attempt to present the play as a standalone story that represents the producers' own political vision. These distortions have created a new play entirely and the most popular versions of Henry V have not revealed Shakespeare’s Henry, but rather one which served its creator’s particular purpose. In Episode 19 of Shakespeare Unbard, Joel Fishbane explores this powerful but uneven play.
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