How I read Shakespeare, and what I’ve discovered about the politics of his plays by doing so.
The second problem — and this one is a doozy — is that dramatic action is a term with no consensus definition...There’s been debates and symposia and panels on what the term might mean for hundreds of years. If you read, say, the great drama critic Eric Bentley’s essay on dramatic action, you can actually watch his brain melt out of his ears in real time as he tries to figure it out...
It was this triangulation that was most important for me in making Lend Me Your Ears. That podcast really grew out of a failure on my part. I was teaching Shakespeare the day after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And it was, for me and my students, a kind of traumatic event. We thought the world was headed in one direction, and it instead was headed in another, far more dangerous one, one we probably should have seen coming. This is the kind of event that Shakespeare wrote about all the time, of course. And yet that day, as I tried to talk to my students, I had nothing of Shakespeare’s to give them. I had no idea what to say.