Major public figures in conversation with Professor Emma Smith explore whether Shakespeare might help us resolve some challenging contemporary issues.

Across the week, Emma talks with Michael Gove on the “levelling up” agenda and King Lear, Will Self on toxic masculinity and Hamlet, Fiona Shaw on post-Covid decisions to move from city to countryside and As You Like It, and Mercy Muroki on whether the monarchy can unite the nation and Richard II.

In this opening episode she discusses the national and international challenges of populism with senior British statesman, Gordon Brown, and Chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Baroness Shriti Vadera.

Shakespeare anniversaries can seem to come thick and fast. 2014 saw the 450th anniversary of his birth and 2016 the 400th anniversary of his death, but this major series marks the most significant anniversary of all. In 1623, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays was published – the so-called First Folio. Without the First Folio, many of the biggest plays – Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, The Tempest – would probably have been lost forever. More importantly, without the First Folio, we wouldn’t have that cast of characters, scenarios and quotations which reverberate across time and inform our thinking.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford and author of This Is Shakespeare. She brings to bear her deep knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays and of the era in which he wrote them – an era sometimes similar to our own and sometime very different – and her passionate interest in contemporary issues. Can Shakespeare help us grapple with these?

With contributions from Professor Paul Prescott

Producer: Beaty Rubens
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