shakespeare unbard

There's a pleasing symmetry to the fact that the Bard opened his career with "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and closed it , so far as we know, with "The Two Noble Kinsmen".  In this last episode of "Shakespeare Unbard", Joel discusses Shakespeare's last known work and leaves you with some parting thoughts. 

Just as King Lear isn't about King Lear and Julius Caesar isn't about Julius Caesar, Henry VIII isn't about Henry VIII. Its central figures are Wolsey and Katharine, each of whom emerge as the protagonists in what amounts to an uneven historical epic.

Mixing history, comedy, and tragedy, Cymbeline is a grab-bag, the equivalent of a Shakespearian mix-tape. There's no way around it: Cymbeline is Shakespeare's craziest play, a wild theatrical experiment that mashes so many different genres, plots, and styles that it's astonishing the thing makes any sense.

There'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.

Growing 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.

Any 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.

Interpreters 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.