Episode 2: Becoming King

11/10/22 • 28 min

Where There's a Will: Finding Shakespeare

Host Barry Edelstein takes us into California’s Centinela State Prison for a one-of-a-kind production of Shakespeare’s English history plays performed by incarcerated individuals. What makes Shakespeare a force of transformation and transcendence behind bars?

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Episode 1: Is Shakespeare American?

The year is 1849, and a riot at a Shakespearean theater has left dozens of people dead. But as it always is with the Bard, there's more here than meets the eye. Why did some people think Shakespeare was important enough to die for? How did the work of one man writing in Victorian England capture the tensions brewing in a newly independent America? And who, if anyone, is Shakespeare really for?

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Next Episode

Episode 3: 4 Hamlets

Hamlet is everywhere right now. But this isn't the same play you read in high school English. We meet the minds behind a singing Hamlet, The Northman's Amleth, and Pulitzer prizewinner Fat Ham's Juicy – and ponder what makes this Shakespearean tragedy speak directly to our time.

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Where There's a Will: Finding Shakespeare - Episode 2: Becoming King

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.064

Pushkin. What is honor a word? What is the net word honor? Who had he'd died? Where that he feel it? No? Those are lines from Shakespeare's play Henry the fourth Part one. It's Sir John Falstaff speaking the scoundrel who's as outrageous as he is oversized. He's on the battlefield honor, bound to fight for king and country, but he'd love to get out of it. So he gives the whole idea of honor a cross examination and decides it's not for him. Theref