You might be thinking ‘Oh no’ as you listen to yet another trailer announcing the BBC’s latest Shakespeare season, designed to showcase England’s great playwright across radio and TV in this Olympics year. ‘Do we really need a 20-part series on Radio 4, scratching through the surprisingly few facts that are known for sure about the Bard, or even trying to evoke that faraway world in which men dressed in slashed-velvet bloomers and heretics were hung, drawn and quartered?’ Actually, we do, and especially when it’s written and presented by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.
Shakespeare’s Restless World, which starts on Monday, doesn’t try to make the playwright more accessible by bringing him up-to-date. On the contrary, the series (produced by Paul Kobrak) is driven by the desire to find out ‘what Shakespeare means here and then’. How were the plays seen in the 1590s? How much is really different now?
Snatches from the plays are interwoven with hard facts about the lives lived by those who would have been in the audience.
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