"A sad tale's best for winter" asserts Mamillius, the doomed prince of Bohemia, and rarely has a Shakespearian character summarized his own story so well. His words are proved true as we watch The Winter's Tale, a bittersweet bit of theatre that is one of the most unique Shakespeare ever devised.
Read MoreThere's no record of the Coriolanus being performed before 1682 and even after that the play remained unpopular. It's only recently that the play finally appears to be achieving some of the recognition it deserves. In this episode, Joel discusses this complex play that should be more popular than it is.
Read MoreMost likely written with a collaborator, Pericles: Prince of Tyre is a dramatic hodegepodge, a mash-up of myth and fairy tales that has the distinction of being one of the few complete dramatic failures in the canon. In this episode, Joel examines the dramatic question of whether Pericles can - or should - ever be staged.
Read MoreEndlessly bewildering, Antony and Cleopatra is, much like Cleopatra herself, a thing of "infinite variety". It leaps around in genre, as if Shakespeare couldn't quite make up his mind. In this episode of Shakespeare Unbard, Joel takes a look at this complex play.
Read MoreGrowing up in the theatre, you learn pretty quickly that it's bad luck to say the name of The Scottish Play while in a theatre, a superstition even agnostics take seriously. None of this has affected the success of this play, which remains one of Shakespeare's most famed, most popular, and most often performed. It's not hard to guess why. There's witches, ghosts, murder, a prophecy, famous speeches, and lots and lots of blood. In Episode 30, Joel discusses this complex and fascinating play.
Read MoreAny discussion of Timon of Athens has to come with a pair of caveats: first, it was most likely written with someone else and, second, the earliest known production happened more than fifty years after Shakespeare's death. Both facts seem equally important when considering this a play that wants to be either a tragedy or a satire and ends up being neither. In Episode 29, Joel examines this timely, yet problematic play.
Read MoreAs 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.
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