Where There's a Will: Finding Shakespeare – Details, episodes & analysis

What happens when William Shakespeare walks into a Yom Kippur service? We take a deep dive into how Shakespeare informs contemporary religious practices and faith traditions, and explore one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays—host Barry Edelstein's favorite—The Winter's Tale. Its focus on the idea of wonder ties all of the Bard's plays, and this season of Where There’s a Will, together.

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Where There’s a Will searches for the surprising places Shakespeare shows up beyond the theater. Barry Edelstein, artistic director at The Old Globe, one of the country’s leading Shakespeare theaters, and co-host Em Weinstein ask what is it about Shakespeare that’s given him a continuous afterlife in all sorts of unexpected ways. You’ll hear Shakespeare doing rehabilitative work in a maximum security prison, helping kids on the autism spectrum to communicate, shaping religious observances, in the Oval Office, and even at the center of a deadly riot in New York City. Join Barry and Em as they uncover the ways Shakespeare endures in our modern society, and what that says about him, and about us. From Pushkin Industries and The Old Globe.

President Obama audio excerpt courtesy of UN Climate Change.

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What happens when a regular person has to publicly speak Shakespeare for a wedding or funeral or bat mitzvah? Barry coaches two listeners through their moments in the spotlight, and along the way illuminates how Shakespeare’s language works. Also, we check out Shakespeare in the mouths of the baseball announcers for the San Diego Padres.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame - Military Band Edition courtesy of US Air Force Band of the West.

Sonnets 18 and 116

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare                                                                                        

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare                                                                             

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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Is a Shakespeare-obsessed 15 year-old geeky, or totally cool? We meet a group of teens who’ve immersed themselves in Shakespeare to hear why they believe this writer speaks to them more clearly than any other. And we also hear about even younger kids with a very special relationship to the Bard: autistic children, who discover ways to express themselves through a writer from 400 years ago.

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To be, or not to be President? Shakespeare is a longtime ally of America’s Commanders-in-Chief, and for good reason: there's plenty to be found in his plays about leadership and how it works. We eavesdrop in the Oval Office to hear how Shakespeare shapes the thinking and feeling of political leaders, and how they draw on him for wisdom and solace. Just don't forget to keep an eye out for Brutus.

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Where men are women, women are men, and gender is As You Like It. Co-host Em Weinstein leads an exploration of how Shakespeare bent gender on the stage and in his writing, and how that inspired Em—and others—to step into their own truth.

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Today, we want to share a preview of another Shakespeare podcast we think you will enjoy, Play On Podcasts, which reimagines Shakespeare's timeless tales into epic audio adventures. Each episode explores plays from Macbeth to A Midsummer Night's Dream, created specifically for the podcast form by some of America's most exciting playwrights, directors, and composers and performed by stage and screen's best. This clip is from the fifth episode, In the Devil's Other Name, of their Macbeth series. In it, Edward Torres directs a Latinx cast into the dark corners of the human psyche through Migdalia Cruz's rendering of Macbeth. It features drag superstars Manila Luzon, Monét X-Change, and Ms. Peppermint as The Witches, with sound design and original composition by David Molina.

For more about Play On Podcasts, visit https://ncpodcasts.com/playonpodcast.

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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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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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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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